After Birth

I

“Tell me it’s going to be OK.”

Ella was sniffling. My Little Pony sheets were pulled straight across her chest, as if the child had managed to slip into the made bed without mussing it at all, or as if the sheet was turned down over the blanket edge and tucked under the mattress after she climbed in for the night. Both hands gripped her mother’s thigh.

April smiled down at her daughter.

“Shhh baby. It’s going to be fine.”

Ella’s eyebrows relaxed in anticipation of the magical incantation.

“Everything’s going to be OK. It’s three nights away and you are going to have a good time. You’ve been to Suzie’s house before, many times. You like it there. This is just like going over to play after school but you’re staying longer.”

“I don’t want to go.”

April lifted her legs onto the bed and stuffed a pillow behind her back. The hard edge of the pink IKEA headboard dug into the muscles below her shoulder blades even through the pillow. It hit right at the sore spot beneath her bra strap, that one sore muscle that never relaxed, that never stopped throbbing no matter what was going on. Ella flopped her head on her mother’s lap.

“Then you don’t have to. You don’t have to go to Suzie’s. But you also don’t have to decide that tonight. Tonight you are sleeping in your own bed, and your own mom is right here.”

“What if I get scared?”

“You call me and I’ll come get you — any time. Just call.”

“What if Suzie’s mom won’t let me call?”

April looked down at her daughter, waiting for an explanation of this new, unusual fear.

“I’ll tell Laura when I drop you off — Mrs. Hennessey — I’ll tell her in front of you and Suzie that I’ve told you you can call any time.”

Ella was silent, but April could feel her daughter’s body through the sheets and the pink comforter. It was still tense as a violin bow in the middle of a symphony.

“Scooch over.”

April unwound the sheets, slipped her legs under the covers and slid down so she could slip an arm under her daughter’s head. Ella turned partway toward April and stretched out her body for maximum contact.

“Everybody else has already had a sleepover. I’m the last one.”

“Not true. Legere hasn’t had a sleepover.”

“Did, with Orion.”

“Doesn’t count, Legere’s Mom stayed over too.”

“Can you stay over at Suzie’s?”

“No, pickle, I cannot. And Emily hasn’t had a sleepover.”

“She did, but she called her mom to pick her up.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Last week, at Julie’s. And her mom didn’t come until 6 a.m., until it was light, so Emily ended up staying all night.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

April wondered what could possibly have forced Sally to ignore her daughter’s call for help in her first sleepover, but realized she knew the answer even as she wondered. Roger. She imagined Sally sitting by the front window waiting for her daughter to call, then lying awake in bed. Roger was probably snoring when the call came. Sally would have known it was coming. Almost none of their girls made it through the night on their first sleepover — except Dorothy. Of course Dorothy. She had never met anyone — child, adult, male, female — with less fear than Dorothy. It took a full-time adult to watch that girl at birthday parties. She wasn’t mean. She wasn’t malicious, but she was fearless and the other girls followed her lead and that was worse. She jumped off the roof of the Monroes’ cottage last summer. She landed on a rock but rolled and bounced up like she’d landed on a trampoline. Then they had to guard the roof all day because other girls kept trying to sneak up to repeat Dorothy’s trick. The girl was only seven years old, but she was dangerous. Sally would have put her phone on vibrate, hoping the call wouldn’t wake her husband, but it did, it must have. And then what? Sally tried to sneak out? Roger, what, hid her keys? Belittled her? Told her she was a bad mother, that she was undermining her child’s confidence and self-esteem? It was Roger, had to be Roger. Why couldn’t those two see they needed to get a divorce? She might have felt badly for Sally in another life, or before she had children herself. But they had a pact — all of them, all the mothers. Not written down, maybe not even spoken out loud, but it was clear. There was a code. And not abandoning your child at a sleepover was part of it. She could feel her anger at Sally rising, not because of how Sally’s daughter probably felt that night, but because her own daughter, Ella, was still rigid and awake instead of floppy and drifting off to sleep and this was partly why. If Emily had been abandoned at a sleepover, then Ella would worry all the more. If one mother failed, they were all suspect.

“I am not Emily’s mom. I would never, ever, ever leave you someplace you didn’t want to be.”

“What if the car broke down?”

“I would get a cab.”

“What if it was raining and all the cabs were melted?”

April smiled. Clearly she had complained too often that the cabs in Halifax vanished in the rain — melted like ice cubes at a Florida picnic in July. It was actual policy for some of them to get off the road if it rained or snowed.

“I would ask Mr. Pickering to drive me.”

“Mr. Pickering?”

Ella almost giggled. April could feel the tremor of lightness flash through her daughter’s taught body as she imagined her mother knocking on Mr. Pickering’s door at midnight in the rain. Mr. Pickering of the wild nose hair, the tobacco-stained fingers, and red striped pyjamas that he wore both day and night. It was a ludicrous image. April wondered for a second if she really would wake Mr. Pickering at 2 a.m. to pick up her daughter from a sleepover and realized she would. If it was the only way to rescue Ella from a night terror, of course she would. Or steal his car.

“Well, I’d try Ken and Ila first.”

Ella looked up at her mother.

“Cause, you know, they live closer.”

Ella’s giggle finally escaped her lips and then she snorted in a short burst of laughter. Her laugh-snort always surprised April. It was such an old-lady laugh for such a young girl.

“Yeah, they’d come, wouldn’t they?”

April stroked her daughter’s head, thinking of their neighbours, the ones who took April’s cat to the vet when she was struck by a car while April was at work. The neighbours who always delivered balloons on Ella’s birthday, and also on James’ birthday, and who never failed to ask if there was anything April needed before they went to the hardware store, Costco, even the library, the couple who always shifted their snow shovels to help April clear the last of her driveway after finishing their own walks after a big storm.

“Of course they would come. I bet even Mr. Pickering would come, if I asked, if he knew it was a favour for you.”

Ella was floppy now, one foot hooked across her mother’s knee like an anchor in the bed, an arm stretched across her mother’s chest. April could feel her daughter’s sleep slipping into her flesh and it was spreading. It was a kind of contagion, this child sleep. Nothing was more relaxing than having a child trust you with their bridge to unconsciousness, with their sleep. That why she had kept her stiff jeans on to put Ella to bed. She thought the constriction of the waistband, the bondage of the tight denim, would keep her awake, help her resist the narcotic of her daughter’s descent into dreamland. It wasn’t working. If April left the bed now, Ella would stir, waken, and be afraid all over again. So she let go, let the muscles of her back unclench, felt her feet flop open under the covers, her arm heavy and already numb under her daughter’s head. She stroked Ella’s black hair with her left hand and dropped her voice to a whisper.

“It’s going to be OK. Everything is going to be OK. Shhh, dream girl. Shhh. Everything is going to be all right.”

II

Ella’s backpack smashed against the wall with a familiar thud followed by the crash of the front door slamming closed. It was the familiar afternoon punctuation of her daughter’s return home from Halifax High School: a one-two note of fear, frustration and April wasn’t sure what else, anger? Not really rebellion. It would be followed by a clunk of boots bouncing off the door of the front hall closet, then the trill of her daughter running barefoot up the stairs, taking them two at a time, to hide in her room. Every afternoon played like a symphony, with a crash and a bang and then a string of quick and even notes. But not today. April raised her head, listening for the arpeggio of her daughter leaping up the stairs. But all she heard was Ella sloughing off her parka, then the smaller clunk of one winter boot and then a second. No feet on the stairs.

“Mom!”

It was a bellow, a summons. April closed the ESL workbook she was grading, stood up slowly, rolling her shoulders back to loosen the tight muscle between her shoulder blades, then walked through the living room to the small front hall. It smelled like wet wool and iron. Her own mittens and hat were drying on a rack over a stand-up radiator that hissed and clanked as April stepped forward. The scent of fresh snow lingered from Ella’s entrance. A low IKEA shoe rack, bought second-hand at a garage sale three summers before, held April’s winter boots, two pairs of Bluntstones, a pair of scuffed black rain boots and a small stack of boiled wool slippers. A rubber mat just fit under the rack, protecting the floor from slush and dirt. There was a gap meant for Ella’s boots — big Sorels with leather uppers, black rubber soles and felt linings. As usual, the Sorels were lying on the other side of the hall. Chunks of icy snow were sliding off the boots onto the tile. The boots had landed toe to toe like conjoined twins, in front of a wall patterned with black streaks from where Ella had kicked off her shoes and boots every day for the last three years, since the confusion of grade seven began.

Her backpack was slumped against the wall beside the boots, directly beneath the peg that April and Ella had installed together, specifically for her daughter’s backpack, when her daughter started middle school. Ella had bought a little craft kit and made a wooden butterfly to hang over the peg. She painted it carefully in shades of pink and purple and hung it at eye level: the last thing she would see before she left the house and the first she would see upon her return. Hung the first day of the new school. That seemed like a very long time ago. The butterfly was long gone, smashed by Ella herself just a few months after grade seven began, smashed one afternoon when April insisted Ella empty her bag and hang it on the hook. It took April more than a year to get around to healing the butterfly wound on the wall. It was the week before Thanksgiving of grade eight when April finally picked the last splinters of wood out of the wall, spackled it, sanded it and then hired Painter Boys to refresh that one wall. She had them paint it blue-grey. She told herself if was a decorating decision, an accent wall, but she picked a shade that she hoped would hide the scuff marks of her daughter’s violent discard of shoes and books. It didn’t. The black scars were just as clear and still grew daily. But there was no trace of the butterfly.

Ella was standing in the middle of the hall, her eyes full of water. She was holding her flute case tight in a hug against her chest. The backpack was thrown — always thrown, every day, all the time: on the ground, at lunch, on the floor in classrooms, on the seat on the bus. But never the flute. Ella held her backpack like a purse, but carried the flute on her back with a long strap, like a quiver. And sometimes, when she was afraid, she hugged it to her chest. It was only with great negotiation that the school convinced Ella to lock the flute in her locker during class, and April suspected that minor victory was long in the past. She had heard from Sally that Betty Medsger had teased Ella about stealing her flute during fourth period. April didn’t even have the energy to get mad at the girl. That was just the kind of thoughtless, petty thing teenaged girls did. It was a kind of survival mechanism, she figured. Girls had to learn early on how to spot vulnerabilities. Just in case. Betty was a wee slip of a girl. She was never going to defend herself with fists or kicks nor with brains — not that one. So, she was learning other ways. Betty wasn’t a bad kid. She certainly wasn’t the worst or meanest girl in Ella’s school. Oh no, not by a long shot.

April stifled the urge to pick up Ella’s backpack and hang it on the peg. She also stifled the urge to wrap her arms around Ella and stroke her blue-black hair. She waited, calmly, waited for her daughter to give her some indication of what she truly needed.

“It’s all your fault!”

Ella stomped her right foot. Her grey wool socks made no sound on the tile. It was a habit she had picked up in kindergarten from Jeremy — the neighbour three doors down whose family moved to Fort Mac when Ella was seven. The gesture was adorable when they were four. The fury of the helpless is amusing. The two of them, faces red, stamping their foot — always the right foot — usually upset over some perceived injustice. Like most children, they expected the world to be fair and were shocked and furious when life deviated from that imagined norm. Jeremy had grown out of foot-stomping, but her daughter never did. April still found the mannerism oddly endearing, though she was aware that others just found it odd. Ella stomped her foot again. The tears were coming now. April did not move toward her daughter, but she held out one hand.

“Tea?”

Ella nodded. She took her mother’s hand and let her lead her to the small kitchen. She sat at a tiny table overlooking the small backyard. It was only when her mother turned her back to fill the kettle that Ella spoke again.

“It’s all your fault!”

April could tell from the crack in her Ella’s voice that her daughter was crying now. She didn’t turn around, but she waited to turn on the tap to fill the kettle, wanting to make sure she didn’t drown any of Ella’s words in case she started to speak. She didn’t get many words from Ella these days. They were precious: a rare glimpse into the anxious mind of her daughter. April has learned the hard way that she couldn’t pull words from Ella. She couldn’t force her to open up. All she could do was try to make it easier for Ella to speak. April moved slowly to the range, listening to her daughter’s sniffles, then turned the knob. Ella spoke again just as the click-click-click of the pilot light sang out.

“It’s all your fault.”

This time, it was more of a whimper.

“What is, darling?”

Darling? Darling? Why in the world had she addressed her fifteen-year-old daughter as “darling”? What an idiot. She had called Ella “sweetie” for thirteen years until one day the term had struck her daughter wrong and she had erupted. April slipped into referring to her daughter as “honey” but stopped at Ella’s request. It was a form request. Ella sat her mother down on a Saturday morning and explained, methodically and in detail, that being called “honey” upset her. It made her feel powerless, she said, like a possession, like something that was owned, that was meant to be consumed, that was expected always, every day and every minute, to be sweet. It was sticky and denigrating. Those were the words she had used “sticky,” and “denigrating,” and she asked formally: “Please mom, don’t call me honey again. Call me Ella or El or Ellie.” April had been grateful for the calm explanation, for her daughter’s unusual willingness to explain her feelings out loud. She thanked Ella for the insight. That was when Ella was fourteen. She hadn’t called her daughter anything but El or Ella since. She managed to scrape all her other pet names for her daughter off her tongue as well: Kitten, Seahorse, YumYums, Dancer, Fairy Girl. Until now. Darling? Really? It was an explicit violation of the request her daughter had made at age fourteen. And it sounded like something from an Agatha Christie novel: fake, British, upper crust. April waited for her daughter to explode but heard only soft sniffles coming from the table by the window.

April moved toward a row of blue cannisters at the far end of the kitchen, careful not to face her daughter as she slid by.

“El, hand me the tea pot, would you?”

The legs of the kitchen stool scraped as her daughter pushed away from the counter. The door of the glass cabinet clicked as Ella closed it and the top of the tea pot rattled slightly as Ella crossed back through the dining room to the kitchen. The little top rattled again as Ella pushed the teapot across the counter towards her mother’s back. April reached back with one hand for the pot and swung it across to the counter without looking at her daughter.

“Red Rose? Rooibos?”

Ella did not speak. April reached for the canister of Rooibos.

“Camomile.”

That surprised April. She didn’t even know if they had chamomile. Where had Ella had chamomile? She found coffee shops too loud and she rarely went over to friends’ homes. At her counsellor’s office? Or maybe it was just something she had picked up from a book, or a video. April opened the door of the full-length cupboard beside the fridge. It was the messiest spot in her mostly tidy house: shelves full of the no-longer wanted and never-wanted, an archeology of the last decade of their lives. Three boxes of out-of-date cereal, each bought on the promise of a healthy diet, that all tasted like cardboard and dust; a bag of marshmallows, unopened, bought seven years before for a camping trip that never happened; fourteen cans of Campbell soup bought during the pandemic, even though both April and Ella hated the underlying chemical tang of all Campbell products; a stack of napkins printed with My Little Pony designs; a box of Indian spices that was a gift from her boss at the ESL centre the first Christmas she worked there; two large jugs of white vinegar; a large glass canister of oatmeal flakes; a half-empty bag of all-purpose, gluten-free flour; twelve bottles of the worst-tasting sugar-free soda either of them had ever had that was sold as a school fundraiser when Ella was in grade five. The strata of the closet showed the phases, weather, crises of their lives. A wicker basket of random tea varieties was on the third shelf, hidden behind three bags of old Ketchup-flavoured potato chips. April dug out two packets of chamomile.

“Found it.”

She didn’t turn but imagined her daughter’s smile behind her back. She put the tea bags in the pot, winding the strings around the teapot handle.

“Tell me, El, what is my fault?”

“I got the flute solo. In the Christmas concert.”

“Ah.”

Ella choked off a sob, then sobbed again. April concentrated on her own body, on her back. She tried to relax her shoulders, her neck, the trapezius, the latissimus dorsi. She wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t try to comfort her daughter. Not yet. But she could relay calm, relay reassurance, just through how she stood at the stove. April breathed in, silently counting four beats, held her breath for two beats, then exhaled for six breaths. Then she did it again. She closed her eyes, willing her daughter to pick up the rhythm of the calming breath.

“If you hadn’t suggested I take up flute.”

April did not smile at the lie, at the repositioning of history, not even to herself. Ella joined the school band in grade five because she had a crush on Terry O’Reilly. He was a head shorter than her daughter and, even April could see, not at all interested in Ella. He was not an attractive child, a carrot top with freckles that weren’t cute, skin that seemed permanently inflamed and, well, no neck at all. But he was also the funniest kid in Ella’s class and April was pleased that her daughter’s first crush was sparked by humour. A good sign. A great sign. Terry played flute in the school band, so April signed Ella up. The crush faded by Halloween and Terry’s last performance with the band was in December. He was a terrible flute player. Maybe deliberately terrible. Everyone knew that Mr. Stevens had asked Terry to just pretend to play in that Christmas concert. “Lift the flute to your lips. Go ahead and finger the keys, but please — please Terry — don’t blow.” But Ella loved it. She loved everything about it. The crush evaporated but the flute stuck. She spent more and more time with the flute as she moved through middle school and then high school. The flute became her best friend.

April said nothing. She had been afraid of this. Ella was now the best musician in the school band. She was, truthfully, very, very good. And that was bound to put her in the spotlight eventually and that would trigger all of Ella’s anxieties. It might even bring on a crisis. April wished for the hundredth that Ella would agree to private lessons. She had always refused, saying she got what she needed from Youtube and the school band instructor. But if Ella had a flute teacher, maybe they could have prepared her for this unwelcome success. Maybe they could coach her through the terror of her own excellence.

April pulled the kettle off the flame at the very first note of its song, then poured steaming water over the two bags. She lifted two mugs from cup hooks hanging over the counter, then reached into the upper cupboard beside the stove for a box of Peak Freans. All these years and she still didn’t know what to say when Ella’s anxiety took hold. She thought of the anxiety as a monster. She even named it once — Arnie, a diminutive, trying to lessen its power — but that didn’t work. It just made her leery of every real person named Arnie. And, of course, she never told Ella that she had personified her daughter’s fears. In fact, she never explicitly mentioned her daughter’s anxiety at all.

She would have to turn around. Was El ready? Ella always talked more when she couldn’t see her mother’s face, when she wasn’t being watched or observed. April had realized that years ago, when Ella was only nine. She stalled for one more minute by putting the cookies on a plate, and then the teapot, cups and plate on a tray. Ella spoke again just as April turned to shift the tray from the counter to the table.

“I don’t want to do the fucking solo!”

“Fucking?”

Ella had never sworn before. She didn’t say ‘shit’ or ‘damn’ or ‘bitch.’ How had she jumped to ‘fucking’?

“Fucking?”

April set the tray down and repeated the cuss word but contorted her lips and wiggled her ears in what Ella had called April’s clown face when she was just a child. Sometimes the face had swatted Arnie away like a gnat.

“Fucking?” The word came out of April’s mouth with a sort of German lisp because her mouth was stretched wide and thin. April shot one eyebrow up, one down, crossed her eyes and puffed out her cheeks.

“Fucking? What ees ziss fucking?”

Ella smiled, coughed up half a giggle.

“Mom.”

April relaxed her face. She returned to her calming breath, looking at her daughter across the table. Ella knew what she was doing. She followed. Four counts in, hold for two, six counts out. Again. And again.

“What does Mr. Hubble want you to play?”

“Debussy.”

She waited.

“Syrinx.”

“Oh.”

It was Ella’s favourite. April was sure her daughter could open her flute case and play it right now, with no sheet music at all. Had Mr. Hubble known that? It wasn’t part of the band’s regular repertoire. Could Ella have mentioned it at school? She had never, to April’s knowledge, played it outside the house. This would be a chance to be coached on Syrinx, to get feedback from a real musician. So, it wasn’t just the terror of the stage, it was also the terror of exposing her favourite song and her interpretation of her favourite song, to criticism.

“Right?”

April pushed a mug toward her daughter, then walked around the island to stand beside her.

“I don’t know what to do Mom.”

Ella took a sip of the steaming tea, then grimaced at the grassy taste, confirming April’s suspicion that her daughter had never actually tasted chamomile before. She set the cup down on the counter, covered her eyes with her forearm and started to cry.

“I can’t do it.”

April put down her own cup, stood up, took the single step that separated her from her daughter. She put both arms around Ella, pulled her toward her and kissed the top of her head.

“Shhh. It’s going to be fine Ella.” Her daughter shuddered inside her hug. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but you know you can do it. I know you can and you do too.”

“I don’t want to.” The words were muffled, barely audible through Ella’s arm and her mother’s hug.

“And you don’t have to. You know you don’t. And you also don’t have to decide that today. All you found out today is that other people recognize you are a good musician, a strong flautist. Mr. Hubble thinks you play the flute well. That’s all that happened today.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I know.”

“Mom, tell me.”

“Shhh. Shhh. It’s OK. It’s fine.

She could feel her daughter waiting for the incantation. April breathed four counts in, held two, six counts out. Her daughter needed to learn to live without this. How could she teach her daughter to go on, to always just go on?

“It’s OK El.” She kissed her daughter’s head again and stroked her black hair. “It’s OK. Everything is going to be all right.”

III

She was sitting on the green slatted bench overlooking the empty sand box, beside the swings. She looked small, or maybe that was a trick of memory, April’s brain imposing images of Ella’s childhood on this adult woman because she was in a playground. But no, they had met here half a dozen times over the last three months to chat and Ella had never seemed small before. Something was off. The November wind blasted across the park, a warning blade of cold. The leaves were gone from the maple trees and the beech trees. A few still stuck to the crooked branches of the oak at the northwest corner of the park, beside the iron gate. It was that transition week of November, what April thought of as warning week, get ready week: no longer autumn but not quite winter. Autumn was finally dead and gone but winter, serious snow, ice and the lock-down freeze of winter, had not yet arrived. But it was coming. It always followed a week like this in November, a wind like this: sharp, merciless, painful, but not deadly. A warning.

Ella was sitting motionless, the wind scouring the side of her face. Her head was bare and she wasn’t even trying to curve herself in protection against the wind. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and her ears were bright red. So was her nose. Why had Ella wanted to meet her here on such a cold day? Something was wrong.

April sat down beside her daughter and pulled her own toque lower on her head, but wind still pierced it, instantly chilling her ears. Ella’s hands were resting in her lap. No mittens. No gloves. Her fingers were mottled — bright red and white — like beef under the fluorescent lights at Loblaws. How long had her daughter been sitting here in the cold? April wanted to pull her own mittens off her hands and shove the wool over Ella’s freezing fingers, but she didn’t. She waited. Ella glanced sideways, saw her mother staring at her cold fingers. She folded her hands into the pockets of her goose down parka. It was a big sandbox, a favourite birthday party location. It could accommodate ten children easily. The box still held the tracks of the last day of late-autumn play: the tread of a toy truck looped back and forth across one corner; a crumbling mound in the middle marked what had probably been a castle weeks before; the sand was pockmarked with holes dug by tiny plastic shovels, and swoosh marks where they had run across its surface. It made April think of ghosts, summer ghosts trying to hang on long past the time they were supposed to disappear. Soon the sandbox would be covered in snow.

“I lost the baby.”

April heard the words before she felt them: a set of syllables that didn’t make sense and then, as they came into focus, the sock of it, the pain. She remembered then an essay that Carol Shields wrote about having terminal cancer. The worst part, she said, was remembering the diagnosis each morning after she woke up. She said it was like being kicked in the gut by a horse every morning. Every morning. April had never understood the metaphor. Until now. It was a physical shock, her daughter’s words. She felt them like a kick in her gut, the soft parts beneath her solar plexus. If she had been standing, the words would have thrown her to the ground.

“Oh my God El.”

So, this was why her daughter wanted to meet in the park on such a cold day. They had sat here, on this bench, half a dozen times since August imagining the baby-to-be while watching the children play in the sandbox, speculating about the child to come. Would it have blonde hair like that one there? Would it be quick to anger like the boy with the truck? They had sat for hours and played with names: Olive. David. Henry. Judy. River. Sarah. Tabitha. Morgan. James. So much joy.

What fools.

“Oh, El!”

April leaned toward her daughter, but Ella leaned away and held up both of her chapped hands to ward off her mother’s hug.

“I wanted you to know.”

April understood why Ella had chosen this park bench. It wasn’t just the home of their shared anticipation — shared fantasy — of motherhood and grandmotherhood, it was outside her house. Ella wouldn’t want to have this conversation in her own home because the pain of it would linger like a bad smell, haunt her home for weeks, or maybe years. This way, Ella could walk away from the pain, leave it behind. Or she would think she could. She had always been a very literal child.

“Oh El.”

Both women fell silent. Ella’s hands dropped to her lap again. It looked to April as if Ella didn’t even know it was cold, didn’t even register the pain. April suddenly felt the ghosts of summer swing alive, both the summer past when they sat and conjured the baby growing in Ellas belly, and the summers when Ella was herself a child: the stinking exhaust of the ice cream truck as it lingered at the edge of the park at 2 p.m. every afternoon; the welcome rush of breeze in the linden tree in August; the drum of water in the splash pad; the roar of the mothers when they spotted a man watching their children from a behind a bush outside the fence, masturbating. They chased him to the edge of the park. April had found herself holding a stick. She was sure she would have beat him, if she had caught him. He was lucky they hadn’t. Ella was only five then.

April edged closer to her daughter. She took off her gloves, took Ella’s left hand and squeezed it between her two palms, then coiled her fingers over her daughter’s fingers. They were so cold. They burned like ice.

“Ella, I’m so sorry.”

Her daughter said nothing. Her hand was almost warm when April spoke again.

“You know, Ella . . . “

“Don’t.”

Her daughter was still looking at the sandbox. It was as if she were addressing one of the summer ghosts still playing there, not her mother sitting beside her, trying to shield her from the November wind.

“I just want to tell . . .”

“Don’t!”

Ella pulled her hand away from her mother.

“You are going to tell me that lots of women miscarry or that maybe there was a reason, maybe there was something wrong with her.”

“No, Ella. I would never . . . “

“Yes. You would. You do. You are going to try to comfort me.”

The word “comfort” came out as a sneer or a curse, something indescribably foul, obscene. April said nothing.

“You were going to tell me everything is going to be all right, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

Was she? April didn’t know. She had no idea what she had been about to say, but Ella was right, she would say anything to bring her comfort.

“Well, it’s not fucking OK Mom. Everything is not fucking OK. And everything is not fucking all right and it’s not going to be all right and it never was.”

Ella was looking straight at April, staring. That was something that hadn’t happened in a long, long time. April remembered the anger. It was a terrible anger, and the exhaustion. Her daughter looked so tired, but also the beauty. Even now, in this nightmare, in a greasy ponytail and blanched white with cold, Ella was one of the most beautiful things on earth — her eyes so blue they could have been dipped from ocean water, her mouth a perfect bow, cheeks so high and clear they looked like chevrons on an officer’s epaulet. How had she ever helped make a being so nearly perfect?

“Ella.”

“Just don’t Mom. Don’t tell me billions of women go through this or that I can try again. And really, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell me it’s going to be all right. It isn’t. You’ve been lying to me Mom, lying to me all my life. Everything isn’t OK. Everything isn’t going to be OK. That’s just a convenient lie — like Santa Claus. That’s just something you said to calm me down, to make your own life easier.”

April said nothing.

“OK. Maybe not just to make your life easier. Maybe you did it for me too. Maybe that’s what Moms do. I don’t know. I’m not a mom. I’m not a mom.”

April thought Ella would stride away then, leave her on the bench in the wind, but she didn’t. Her daughter reached over and took one of her mother’s hands between her own.

“I’m really angry right now Mom. I’m really, really angry and I don’t know if that’s ever going to go away. I’m angry at you, but I’m angry at everything. I’m angry at Mrs. Ng at the corner store, with her five chubby kids. I’m angry at the streetcar driver, and the guy who panhandles in front of the bank. I’m angry at Jeremy. I’m angry at the sand box.”

April felt her throat closing up. It was as if she had swallowed a wad of raspberry brambles. And her eyes were filling. She had never teared up in front of Ella before, never ever. She had always held strong when her daughter needed her. She couldn’t tear up now, not when her daughter was in so much pain. April closed her eyes, hoping that would hold the tears inside.

“You told me everything was going to be OK, but that isn’t true. It was never true. Maybe I should have known that. You know, Auschwitz, the Native American genocide, Dolly’s leukaemia. Like get a fucking clue Ella. But I believed it because you said it, Mom. And that was wrong. And that’s part of why I’m angry.”

April nodded but didn’t open her eyes.

“I’d like you to stay away for a while. Maybe a week? Maybe two? Dr. Mac says this anger will fade, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s a lie too. I love you, Mom. I still love you, but I don’t want to see you for a while.”

Ella placed her mother’s hand back in her lap. April felt the old wooden bench flex as her daughter stood up. April waited five full breaths before she opened her eyes, letting the well of tears finally escape. Ella was already at the far corner of the square, about to cross the street and head back north into the city. She didn’t look back.

IV

Ella straightened the sheet crossing her mother’s chest. April was sleeping. She was always sleeping now, it seemed. They told you not to tell your children that death was like sleep because that would make them afraid to go to bed. At least, that’s what Dr. Hirsch had said when he was explaining it all to Ella.

“Don’t tell Maddie and Sue and Peter that their grandmother is going to sleep forever. Don’t do that Ella. It’s not true and it causes real problems. Real problems.”

As if she would have done that. Or, who knows, maybe she would have. She might have, if it made it easier for them to say goodbye to Grandma April.

“You can do this Ella.”

That was the other thing Dr. Hirsch had said.

“It will be easier than you expect. And you will be very glad in the years to come, you will be very glad you did.”

Was it easier than she expected? She didn’t know. She had never thought about it before, never expected it until it was suddenly a choice. Bam. Do you want your mother to die close by or far away? Do you want to hold her hand, or do you want someone else to? Only ten days. She tried to be angry that April had withheld her diagnosis for so long. It wasn’t fair to her, or the kids. She had left them so little time to prepare. But Ella had seen the slide. She had seen the flesh melt from her mother’s bones, seen how her steps got shorter and shorter and her breath shallower and shallower until she couldn’t even walk from the car to the door of Safeway without stopping to rest. She saw all that and tried to tell herself it was normal aging, but Ella was very bad at lying, even to herself. So, she knew, somewhere in her heart, she knew. So, she wasn’t angry. She didn’t have the energy to be angry anyway.

Her mother mostly slept and Ella mostly cried. That was new too. The kids were more freaked out by their mother’s tears than by their grandmother sleeping on a hospital bed in the dining room. It was almost funny. Almost. They smashed through the door after school last Thursday and skidded to stillness when they saw her weeping on the couch. They didn’t even throw their little backpacks against the wall. It was like the day she set up the loom. All three kids took pride in her modest Canadian fame: she was well known for her knitted sculptures. They sold well in Canada; three had been purchased by European collectors. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia had even bought one. She had no idea how that happened, where or how their interest was sparked and neither did her gallery, but now Uterus was hanging on the third floor of the provincial art gallery in Halifax. It took up a third of the room. The piece was a massive complexity of red, green, purple, orange and black yarn. They hung it just right — without even asking her — so patrons had to look up at the giant womb and all its malevolent veins and tubes and tendrils. In her mind, the piece was a womb still sore and swollen from pregnancy, dripping blood and amniotic fluid, a ragged, exhausted placenta following the birth. That wasn’t in the gallery notes. It was only in her mind, but no one would mistake the piece for anything other than a raw and violent creation. It did not represent the calming side of motherhood.

The kids liked that their mother was sometimes mentioned in the very back pages of the Globe and Mail. So did their teachers. And they liked it when she wriggled into a shiny black dress a few times a year to attend openings. She had brought them to the last one. They quickly got bored and ran around the gallery full-tilt in a raucous game of tag. André actually asked her to shush them. She laughed. But then there was the loom. They came home one day and found Ella sitting at a giant loom set up in the living room. The cacophony of yarns was gone, replaced by a huge open cupboard of tiny cubbyholes holding the threads of her new art form. They had skidded to a halt, just like this when they saw her crying on the couch, skidded into silence. Their mother was a knitter, not a weaver. It was an alternate reality. God help them if she had decided to branch into painting and abandoned textiles completely. And now, she was faced with the same silence. Mother was a comforter, not a crier. It was like seeing the negative of a photo — who knew what contrasts, what images could be hidden/revealed in the reverse of black and white?

The doctor said it would be easier than she expected, but she had never expected it, so she did not know if that was true. She had never imagined it either, but she could imagine having imagined it. She had spent much of her life as an artist doing just that: imagining imagining. Easier? Probably. The hospice nurses came every other day. They didn’t do much. Checked how quickly April was dying and gave their report, checked to see if she had enough medication, patted her mother’s hand. They always did that at the end of the visit — patted her mother’s hand, the top of her hand, like you would pat the head of a dog if you weren’t a dog person and didn’t know that what most dogs want is a scratch behind the ears, not a pat on the head. Health Ontario had sent a personal care worker too. That first day she helped April shower and propped her up by the kitchen counter for a few sips of soup and crackers, but Ella took over those duties. The personal care worker was surprised. That kind of intimate care — the wipe on the toilet, the spoon of semi-solids in the mouth — was hard for families, she explained. But it wasn’t hard for Ella, not at all. The personal care worker’s duties also included doing pedicures and manicures. Ella didn’t have those skills, but all three of them recognized that April was not going to live long enough to need another pedicure. So mostly, April slept. And mostly, Ella cried. She was surprised by that. Not as surprised as her children, but still well and truly surprised. She had always veered to anger when things went bad, never grief. The crying had become an almost out-of-body experience, unconnected to emotion. She just cried. Water leaked from her eyes and fell on her face. Her throat no longer closed. She no longer heaved with sobs. She was just leaking, all the time. She had sprung a leak.

Ella sat on the stool beside her mother’s bed and looked at April’s face. She remembered her mother as a big woman, but this woman dying in Ella’s dining room was small and getting smaller. Death, it seemed to Ella, was a kind of shrinking. April looked smaller and also younger. That was gravity, Ella deduced. Her mother’s face was relaxed. Because she was lying flat, gravity pulled the skin toward her ears and her scalp, smoothing out some of the wrinkles on her cheeks and brow. A face-lift effect. Her skin seemed translucent, like phyllo pastry before it is baked. Ella had the illusion that if she looked closely enough at her mother’s face, she would see the muscles, veins, maybe even the skull bones underneath. The kids were spending the night at a sleepover in the school gym — a fundraiser for Oxfam. Jeremy was on a two-night business trip to New Jersey. The personal care worker had left hours ago, and the hospice nurses weren’t due until the next day. They were alone.

April hadn’t wakened all day. She snored softly in the morning, but then stopped that too. Her breath had been raspy for weeks, since before she moved into the hospital bed in the dining room. Ella could hear her mother’s breath in every room of the house except the kids’ bathroom. Her mother was dying loud.

Ella let her mind flit to the scenario that had played at the edge of her consciousness all day: a familiar scenario. It was a conscious decision to let that future scenario slip into the present, or let the possibility of it slip into the present, to consider if she, if they, were finally here. Her mother hadn’t opened her eyes since Ella woke up at seven. She hadn’t rung the little silver bell Ella had bought for her nightstand, a delicate chime for help with indelicate tasks: lifting her onto the toilet, spooning cream of wheat between her gums. It had struck Ella several times how much work it was to die. Her mother was working harder than she was. The hospice twins had warned her that her mother might have a stroke. She was still on her blood pressure medications; Ella didn’t really understand why. Stroke was one of the many final options, they explained. April wouldn’t die of the disease itself; it would trigger something else. Already her kidneys were barely functioning, but today it felt like something else.

“Mom.”

Her own voice startled her, seemed so loud in the empty house.

“Mom!”

April didn’t stir. Her top lip fluttered with each exhale. Ella tried louder.

“Mom!”

Nothing. Ella pushed her mother’s arm, pushed it with both hands like you would a baby carriage on the way out the door. Then she shook her mother’s shoulder, softly, then harder, then hard enough that she saw April’s whole body wobble under the sheet and quilt from the force of Ella’s shaking. Still nothing. Ella lifted up her mother’s right arm by the wrist. It was floppy, the hand hanging down, the elbow hanging down. Ella moved the wrist back and forth and April’s hand waved slightly. The sagging flesh of her underarm blew back and forth like a sheet hanging from the line. Ella thought about theatre class in university, how they practiced trying to relax their body, trying to let go of control over their muscles and tested it by having others raise and shake their limbs. No one had ever relinquished this much control. No one had ever been as loose-limbed as her mother was now. Ella put her mother’s hand back on top of the quilt, arranged her arm in what looked like a comfortable position. April’s eyes remained closed, her breath noisier than ever.

Ella had tried to describe that sound to herself, a week ago, when she was sorting through the new experiences, trying to fit them into familiar, or at least rational, categories. She used her musician memories to try to identify the scrape of her mother’s breath, but she couldn’t come up with a single instrument that approximated the percussion of her mother’s lungs struggling for air. The guiro was closest. She had once had an affair with a guiro player. The sounds he could make with a dried-out gourd were astonishing. The sex was good, but the music was better. Her clear flute and his gritty guiro complemented each other perfectly. But her mother’s breath wasn’t quite the sound of the guiro: her breathing was too unpredictable to be echoed by the evenly spaced ridges of the guiro.

Ella went into the kitchen, filled the kettle and dropped a bag of Rooibos in a big red mug. She fussed with the honey, the milk, put the teabag in the compost and sat at what she still thought of as the kids’ window, overlooking the backyard. The grass needed cutting and the rose bushes were past bloom. She had neglected to cut the blossoms. A mess of bicycles was blocking the back gate. It wasn’t much of a backyard. Ella had never put much energy there, had just been grateful to have a fenced outdoor playpen when the kids were toddlers. She sniffed her tea and listened to her mother breathe. It seemed important to find a reference for the sounds. It was the only thing Ella thought about as she sipped her Rooibos. A car splashing through a puddle in the fall? No. Too big. A bicycle splashing through a puddle? Closer. The hum of a wet bicycle wheel rolling down a city street? There was something similar there, but the bike tire hum was too even. Ella looked at the door into the garage. They had never stored a car in there. They had never owned a car. But Jeremy had built himself a little wood shop in the damp, unheated cavern. When they first bought the house, he suggested she use the garage as a studio, but she had flatly, instantly, and unequivocally refused. Too dark. Too damp. Too cold. Too wrong. There was something of the clatter of the loom in her mother’s breath, that woosh of fibres rubbing past each other and the kerthunk of the peddle after the shuttle passes through. She had recognized almost at once, when she started to weave, that the rhythm of the loom was the rhythm of breath: in and out, back and forth. But no, the loom was a clean, airy, open breath and her mother’s was messy, dark and getting darker. She stared at the sun medallion Jeremy had carved from walnut and hung on the back of the garage, facing the house. It was picking up the last of the day’s sun, its dark grain flickering gold with a molten light as the sun sank behind the city. A saw. The sound of a saw. That was closer. A handsaw ripping through a two-by-four. No. A hacksaw carving through a sheet of thin plywood. Closer, but still not right. There was a ripping quality to April’s breath, as if a tiny thousand strands were breaking with every inhale. Ella started at the sound of a low whistle. She had heard that a few times before in the last few days, a low-octave moan, like the sound of a Peruvian pipe, or the sound of a train approaching but still far away, still out of sight. It was an exhale sound. April moaned again. But the inhale, she was close to finding the right comparison. Sandpaper? No. That was a back-and-forth sound, and this sound moved in just one direction. She got it just as she finished the last of her tea, and was disappointed. Her mother’s inhale sounded like a rasp drawn along a piece of hard wood: oak, or beech, or maple. It was a cliché. That was all she could come up with: raspy. That is why they call it a raspy breath.

Ella put the cup in the sink and pulled over the carpenter stool that she used to reach the top shelf of her kitchen cabinets. But what she wanted was above that — hidden in the dead air between the ceiling and the cupboards. She climbed up, kneeling on the kitchen counter, reached into the ledge above the cupboard and drew down a small, locked box. The hospice nurses had warned her this might happen — her mother might lose consciousness, but she would still feel pain. And she would still be able to hear sounds, conversations, around her. Even if she was in a coma, they told her, she could still hurt, and still hear. It would be up to Ella then to manage her mother’s pain.

She had locked the vials of liquid morphine in an old bank box and hidden it above the kitchen cabinets. Jeremy looked at her like she was being ridiculous, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t even shake his head. Maybe she was being ridiculous. The kids were almost teenagers. They weren’t toddlers. They wouldn’t drink something just because it was there, just out of curiosity. They had brains and good judgment and no longer needed to be protected from random poison. Still, opiates. There was nothing more dangerous than opioids. Hospice had given her enough liquid morphine to kill her whole family, and a few cousins too. She knew there was no reason to lock the vials up and hide them away, but it made her feel better — and that was enough.

She left one vial on the counter and took the other into the dining room. She was crying harder now, and her own breath was ragged. She wiped her eyes with both bare hands, but then couldn’t twist open the bottle of morphine because her fingers were slippery with tears. She went back into the kitchen, washed and dried her hands, then grabbed the dragonfly tea towel from the oven rail — a present from her mother after she and Jeremy got engaged. The tea towel had a burn mark on one corner and a smear of barbecue sauce on another edge, but much of it was clean. Enough of it was clean. Ella’s tears made it hard to see what she was doing. The hospice nurse had said three drops under the tongue. Ella would have to be careful with it, she explained, because morphine depressed breathing and too much would hasten death.

How was she supposed to do this? And how much pain was her mother in?

Ella approached the woman lying on the bed. She had smoothed the sheet over her mother’s breast before she went into the kitchen, straightened the little pillow behind her head and folded one hand over the other just below her solar plexus, on the quilt. That tone again — the train whistle exhale. Her mother’s lips fluttered as the moan wafted across the room. How would she get the morphine under her tongue? Ella loaded the dropper, leaned over her mother and gently squeezed her jaw at the hinge. It was instinctive, a move learned from giving medicine to a boyfriend’s golden retriever years ago. The light was bad, but she could see that her mother’s tongue was flopped to one side. Good. She wouldn’t have to hold the tongue up. She had been worrying about how she would hold her mother’s jaw open, hold up her tongue and administer drops all at once. Ella squeezed carefully. She couldn’t see the drops fall, though. Had she given her enough?

Her mother probably hadn’t had any pain medication since the family went to bed the night before. So, eighteen hours, maybe twenty. Her pain must be intense, maybe excruciating. Ella turned the reading lamp full on her mother’s face and opened her jaw again. Her mother looked waxy under the glare of the light: a still, chalky approximation of the real April Stuart. The nurse had explained the procedure to Ella in the kitchen, out of April’s hearing, using her own mouth to demonstrate.

“This time, Ella could see the drops as they fell on what the hospice nurse had called the frenulum, the membrane that fixes the tongue to the base of the mouth. Two drops. But she didn’t know if the first squeeze had given her mother any morphine at all. Ella squirted the rest of the stopper’s contents into her mother’s mouth and let her jaw relax. She really, really didn’t want April to be in pain.

Ella switched off the lamp. The dining room was grey. Twilight played on the street outside. Ella sat on the stool and put her head on her mother’s belly and then the quilt was wet with tears. Their breath grew more ragged together. Ella heaved and gasped and shuddered as she cried. April’s breath got louder, then less regular, until there were many long seconds between the flutter of her exhale and the staccato ripping that marked the effort to draw air into her fading life.

Ella picked her head up off the bed. She picked up her mother’s right hand and held it to her cheek, then looked at it. The skin was covered in tiny creases, like the crackling of a piece of old china, an archipelago of brown spots flung across the back of her palm. Her nails were pale, almost white. Ella kissed the islands, then held April’s hand between her own palms.

“It’s OK Mom. It’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.”