What We Hold In Our Hands Read online

  As she settled down to nurse, I watched an unfamiliar soap on TV. A man and woman were kissing. She broke free, asking, “What about Jake?” The scene cut to Jake in the hospital listening through a stethoscope to a young boy’s heartbeat, his furrowed brow expressing concern.

  Alice’s lips released their suction on my nipple, which pointed upward about an inch from her sleeping face. After carrying her to the crib, I took out my linguistics books, sat at the table, and began the assigned exercises. It was easy to label each syllable with its phonetic symbol, each word with its syntactical function—easy and boring. I turned on the radio, fiddling with the stations, stopping the dial when I heard Donna Summers’ “MacArthur Park.” I danced around the room, twirling and leaping like I used to in ballet, swaying and rocking during the slow parts. The song over, I stood by the window, heart pounding, and watched the people below until my breath and pulse slowed to normal.

  I wondered what I’d be doing if I didn’t have Alice, if Cam and I hadn’t married. Would he and I be together? Would I have attended a different university? I’d planned to go to McGill to study English, improve my French, and write poetry in the coffee shops and delis of Montreal, to live on my own in practice for my dream of living and writing in a Paris appartement. But even having an apartment in a Toronto high-rise was exciting for Cam and me.

  After a year, I still felt a thrill looking out the living-room window over the streets below. I’d place my hand on the cold glass, and peer at the scene through my fingers. An electric feeling would run down the back of my neck and along my arms. With this feeling came the thought that these must be someone else’s fingers, that I must be living someone else’s life, and somewhere out there was the person who was living mine—that woman in high-heeled boots striding up the sidewalk, flinging open a restaurant door, or that man ducking his head against the wind, backpack slung over one shoulder, ignoring the traffic as he crossed the street.

  On my birthday, my parents came to town, sleeping overnight on the pullout couch they’d bought us when we’d moved in. My mother gave me a new china doll, the first in years. She had curly brown hair, blank startled blue eyes, and a lacy pink dress.

  “Thanks, Mom.” I placed the doll on the shelf with the others.

  “I thought she looked a bit like Alice.”

  I couldn’t see any resemblance. If Alice got hold of the doll, she’d soon be smashed, her dress torn.

  “How are you and Cam doing?” my father asked.

  “We’re fine,” I said, thinking how I’d returned from work last Saturday to find Alice and Cam asleep on the couch, his head flung back while he snored gently, as if, even in his dreams, he was aware of her soft damp weight on his chest.

  When Cam got home, my father patted him on the back, asking, “How’s the old U of T?” My father, an alumnus, still thinks of those years before he became an accountant and married my mother, as the best of his life.

  My mother simply nodded at Cam. She blamed him for taking me away, even though I would’ve gone farther east if I hadn’t gotten pregnant and married him. When Cam and I separated two years later, her feelings about him changed. Like her, he became another person I had left behind.

  Now, she sends Cam Christmas cards and calls him on his birthday. I’ve started to call him too. He’s sweet and gruff with me, the coolness of many years gone from his voice. He tells me how Alice taught his sons to dive at their cottage on Lake Erie, how he sometimes cannot believe she’s his daughter—she’s so grown up, so sure of herself. She tells him about the play she’s writing for her thesis, how she’s learning to direct the student actors. She drags Cam and his wife to summer theatres, where, after half a lifetime of studied indifference to drama and literature, he admits to enjoying the plays.

  “I want to do my Ph.D. in Montreal,” Jackson said.

  We were sipping coffee across from each other, while Alice banged my spoon against his Collected Works of Milton.

  I started to daydream about living in Montreal with Jackson—the two of us strolling down tree-lined streets. Sometimes, Alice was there, running along beside us, pulling my hand to show me something in a shop window. Other times, it was just Jackson and me, bodies pressed together, eyes locked, oblivious to passersby. These fantasies became a secret addiction, a place I’d retreat whenever I felt lost or unhappy. If Cam arrived home when I was in the middle of one, or if Alice called me from her crib, I’d feel a stab of guilt over my eyes, would sometimes be blinded by it, unable to see clearly for moments afterward, staring up at Cam’s distorted features or into Alice’s blurry little face.

  Looking back, I understand how wanting Jackson felt like a betrayal, not only of Alice and Cam, but also of myself. With my decision to give birth to Alice, instead of seeking an abortion, I’d appointed myself her champion, defending her right to exist in the face of pressure from our parents and friends, not to mention our own doubts and longings. In spite of all this opposition, or perhaps because of it, and thriving on it, I’d swooped down and saved Alice from non-existence. More than that, I’d grown her inside me and pushed her out into the world. But then came the hard part, the days and nights when I had to admit that I might not be up to the job, that the cape I’d donned might not be enough to separate me from the mothers I heard about on the news.

  Afternoons in the café with Jackson helped me to cope. Daydreams helped too, by carving a space in the day where my stifled desires could take a few moments to stretch out and breathe.

  In February, Jackson invited Cam and me to a party in his dorm.

  “It’ll be fun,” he said. “I’ll get to see you shake loose.”

  “We’ll come if we can find a sitter,” I said, knowing that with such short notice I wouldn’t be able to find anyone I’d trust to take care of Alice.

  When I told Cam, he said, “You go, Janelle. I’ll stay with Alice. Jackson’s your friend anyway.”

  “Okay, but I won’t stay late.”

  “Stay as late as you want. Alice will be asleep, and I’ll be studying. Enjoy yourself.”

  Cam pulled me to him and kissed me. He seemed to like the idea of my going out. I felt the familiar blinding pain seize my eyes.

  But that night, I left Cam holding Alice and walked the few blocks to Jackson’s dorm. Big, lazy snowflakes drifted down, but I felt warm in my winter coat and boots, comforted by the softness the snow lent the city, like blankets and pillows spread out on the street for a pyjama party. I stood outside Jackson’s building for a while, gazing up as the flakes came faster. When I finally climbed the stairs to his room, my hair was wet with melt.

  “Janelle.” Jackson’s eyes were bright and startled. “I didn’t think you were coming.” He took my coat, nodding and pacing, as if trying to remember where to put it.

  “Sit down,” he said, finally dropping it onto the bed in the corner. “No one’s here yet.”

  Incense was burning on a shelf, Peter Gabriel playing on the turntable. I sank into a deep old armchair and stared at my feet in their grey woollen socks. Jackson, who sat cross-legged on the floor beside me with a bag of weed and some papers, started to roll a joint. I’d only smoked up once when I was in high school. Ellie used to call me a do-gooder, but when Cam and I were at one of his brother’s parties a few weeks before graduation, Dan had given us a joint to share, saying, “This’ll put you in the mood.” That night we forgot about the condom in Cam’s back pocket, and Alice was conceived.

  Jackson offered me a drag.

  “No thanks.” I was determined not to go there again. “I’m nursing. The chemicals…”

  “Sorry. Does it bother you if I smoke?”

  “No. I like watching you.” I’d noticed how Jackson’s eyes got mellow back when he used to smoke with Dan in Cam’s garage. It occurred to me that I’d been watching Jackson for years.

  He held the joint in one hand and rubbed my sock-cove
red toes with the other.

  “What’s the snow like?” he asked after a long fragrant exhalation.

  “Like wet velvet on my face. Or cats’ tongues without the scratchiness.”

  “Let’s go out and play in it.” He squeezed my toes.

  “What about the party?”

  “I’ll leave the door open. Ross will be here any minute. He just went to buy beer.”

  We walked to the park around the corner where we made snow angels and two giant snowballs from small ones we each rolled through the sticky snow. We scooped out the insides to make chairs, which we sat in, staring up at the sky.

  “I feel like Gabriel Conroy watching the snow,” Jackson said. “Separated from everyone and everything, yet connected too, by this big white blanket.”

  “Mmm,” I agreed.

  I never did go to the party. Jackson and I just stood outside his building for a while.

  “I’m tired. I’m going home,” I said, shivering in my snowy jeans.

  He wrapped his arms around me. “I’m cold too,” he admitted, holding me there. I was aware only of the warmth of our two bodies inside their winter coats, and his scent, an unruly mix of cinnamon, sawdust, and marijuana.

  We stood like that until two guys yelled, “Hey, Jacks, where’s the party?

  “Bye, Janelle,” Jackson called after me.

  I took the long way home through the park where we’d played in the snow, and behind the big new library with its concrete ramp zigzagging up to the main floor. Then I passed the older university buildings, their stone ornaments shrouded with snow, the lamplight casting intricate patterns of light and dark, gold and grey onto their white lawns. I skirted Queen’s Park full of shadowy trees, walked through Victoria College and under the archway onto St. Mary’s Street, smiling at couples walking the snowy sidewalks and students tossing snowballs, but I didn’t feel happy so much as grief-stricken and lost. Like Jackson, I felt alone too—cut off from the people I loved—but also bound up with them, carrying them everywhere.

  When Alice was in grade school, she spent most of her summers with Cam. I’d write her long letters, marking the bottom of each page with rows of X’s and O’s, representing all the kisses and hugs I was unable to give her while she was away. The X’s reminded me of the ones knitted into Jackson’s old woollen sweater, how I used to stare at them when I was feeling too shy to look into his face.

  In the spring, we didn’t see as much of Jackson. We stopped frequenting the café because Alice wanted to be in the park or the playground, and Jackson was writing final papers for his courses. I still saw him at the library carrying stacks of books, dark circles under his eyes, his beard heavier than usual.

  Cam was studying for exams, tense and troubled with nightmares of failure. He needed a high average for medical school, although the competition wasn’t as fierce then as it is now. One evening during his study period, I told him that Jackson was coming to dinner.

  “I’m not in the mood for Jackson.” He picked up Alice’s toys from the floor and dropped them into the playpen. “He reminds me of Dan, how Dan’s still stuck at home working at the Canadian Tire, how that could be me if I don’t do well on these exams.”

  “You’ll do fine. You’re smart, and you’ll never be like Dan. And we’re never moving back home.”

  “Yeah. We’re never moving back home as long as your parents pay our rent.”

  “They like helping out,” I said, filling a pot with water to boil the spaghetti. “What’s the problem? As long as my parents can afford to help?”

  “The problem is my parents can’t, and it makes them feel bad.” He dumped Alice’s blocks into the playpen where they rattled over the other toys like the rain that had pelted our windows the night before.

  “So what do you want me to do about it?”

  Cam just glared at me. Alice woke up crying. And the intercom buzzed.

  He jabbed his finger against the red button.

  I didn’t know then that Cam would move back home for a couple of years, commuting to Waterloo where he’d be studying pharmacy, since his marks had not been high enough for med school. Or that I would have left for Montreal with Alice even before that, though not to be with Jackson.

  In those days, I thought I had the power to make things happen just by saying or even thinking them. From childhood, I’d felt responsible for other people. My mother had leaned on me, confided her secrets, counting on me to help, since Ellie was so unreliable, and the boys were boys after all.

  “You’re the strong one, Janelle,” she’d said. “I need you to make the boys dinner and keep them out of trouble.”

  “Why can’t they get their own dinner?”

  “I don’t want them messing about in the kitchen, upsetting your father.”

  My father came home after my brothers and I had eaten. He patted my mother’s head, brought her a cup of tea. “How’s my darling?” he asked, holding her hand, playing with the fingers.

  When I got pregnant, I’d felt confident that I could handle motherhood a whole lot better than my own mother had, that I could take care of Cam and Alice, keeping the three of us together, that I could give Cam so much love and support he’d make it through med school without a hitch.

  While we waited for Jackson, I lifted Alice out of her crib and changed her soaking diaper.

  “Mummum,” she said, which meant she wanted to nurse. I heard the door open and Jackson’s soft, eager voice in the hall. I longed to see him scratch his chin and to smell the exotic mix of scents rising from his sweater as I pressed my face briefly against his for a hello kiss. But I wasn’t comfortable nursing Alice in front of him, and I didn’t want to be stuck in my bedroom with her for the next half-hour.

  “Mummum,” she cried, tugging up my shirt.

  “No,” I said, pulling it back down. “Here.” I grabbed one of Cam’s old Matchbox cars from the top of the dresser to distract her. “Car,” I said.

  “Car,” said Alice, clasping it to her chest while I carried her out to greet Jackson.

  I reached to hug him with my free arm.

  “What’s that in Alice’s mouth?” Cam yelled.

  I pulled away from Jackson.

  Alice’s face was red, and she was choking. Something small, black, and round sat at the back of her mouth. Fishing it out with one finger, I found myself holding the saliva-soaked front wheels of Cam’s Matchbox car. Held together by a metal axle, one wheel still bore its rubber tire, but the other was bare.

  Cam snatched the wheels from me. “She must have swallowed the other tire.” He grabbed Alice too.

  “It won’t hurt her,” I said, hoping it was true. “It’ll just come out the other end.”

  Alice was breathing again, but her eyes and mouth had narrowed, a sure sign she was about to bawl.

  “You know she shouldn’t play with those cars.” Cam glared at me.

  I retrieved the car from the floor, then threw it down the hall and into our bedroom where it rolled to a stop under the bed. My eyes started to burn. I knew that giving her the car had been wrong, that she could have been hurt, but my guilt only made me feel angrier and more resentful.

  “The water’s boiling.” I headed for the kitchen as Alice began to cry.

  “Can I help with anything?” asked Jackson.

  “No.”

  Soon dinner was ready. My eyes still smarted, but Alice was squealing and running around the living room, bringing toys and books to Jackson, who sat on the couch joking about old times. Cam stretched on the floor, grinning, beer in hand. At dinner, Cam continued to reminisce. “Jacks, remember when you and Dan used to break into my locker and pinch my stuff?”

  “Yeah, we loved to torment you. You were such a self-assured little creep.”

  “Remember when you took my coat and I had to walk home from school coatless, in a snowst
orm. Boy, did Mom give it to Dan that time.”

  I thought Cam should be angry with Jackson for bullying him at school, but the two of them laughed like brothers, clutching each other’s shoulders, while Alice slopped spaghetti around the tray of her highchair, her face orange with tomato sauce. Up on the top shelf, the row of china dolls gazed at the opposite wall, and I felt myself shift into that electric state I sometimes entered when looking out the window over our small patch of city.

  “Janelle, what courses are you taking next year?” Jackson asked, just as I was imagining myself on a train, speeding eastward along the curve of Lake Ontario, watching the city shrink.

  “I haven’t thought yet.” I stared at the gold bristles on his chin.

  “I can help with your choices.” He twisted the last strands of spaghetti onto his fork.

  “Maybe I won’t take any courses next year. Maybe I’ll get a full-time job or go to community college and learn something useful like book-keeping.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Cam said. “You’re not giving up your education. Having a baby is not going to change our lives.”

  “But it has changed our lives. We’re different already. We don’t live like normal students, like Jackson, who can goof off when he wants and spend the afternoon drinking coffee and talking to Alice and me. You work constantly, either studying or waiting tables, and I’m attached at the breast to Alice. Even if I put her in daycare, she’d still be on my mind all day.” My eyes were hot with tears. “I’m a mother now and I can’t shake that, just like I can’t shake the thought that if you don’t do well on your exams you’ll blame Alice and me for distracting you.”

  I jumped up from the table to get a tissue. Jackson and Cam stared at their plates, but I didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed or regretful for my outburst. Maybe it was the talk about the old days that had gotten to me, how hilarious Cam now found the bullying he’d suffered from his brother and Jackson, like those days were fun compared to what he was enduring now, tied to Alice and me.