The End

Neighbourhoods have an ecology. The one surrounding our cyberpunk loft made sense. The people were as eccentric as our building’s colour scheme, and as busy as our industrial habitat. We had variety, biodiversity and pluralism, except for one glaring and uniform fact: nobody had kids.

Sure, one guy on the fourth floor had his daughter two days a week. But that was it. We enjoyed couples galore, but we were a kid-free Romper Room. The graffiti in the elevator was actually the work of adults. What sort would carve the word “loaf” was another matter. So, though I say we were a kid-free zone, there seemed to be exceptions. In our building we made it our pride and priority to indulge ourselves, to turn volume dials up, to erect drill presses beside our sofas, to throw raves on a Wednesday and continue them until Friday, to sleep in a medieval fantasy, and, above all, to remain stuck in the years when Judas Priest was popular. We were a plaza of Peter Pans. Me included.

The hallmark of my youth had always been recklessness. Blindness had cured much of that in my character, enforcing a more cautious person to take over. Not that I always agreed with the rules, but my body and safety demanded I live more slowly, more deliberately, and even more habitually. To that end, the neighbourhood where we’d lived before we decided to have a family had long served as an extension of my white cane. While I’d tapped around those same six blocks for ten years, living in a variety of basement suites and rooms, my mind had equally worn its own path, memorizing and building a map that I lived in. If pressed, and if nothing radical or spontaneous happened, I could have walked my old neighbourhood without a cane. Slowly, of course, and with a minor amount of pole-to-face trauma, but I could have done it. My life had a safety net of well-worn routine, and everybody knew me. Not here, though, not in Neverland’s warehouse district.

Industrial parks are imagined for cars and trucks, not blind men. Grocery stores don’t locate themselves within shuffling distance of a Muffler King. Here, I was a kid sleeping in the storage space of the city. Every time I came home with bruises and near-death experiences, it became clearer that I needed foam. Foam on every mailbox, signpost, chain link fence, bus bench and truck grille. Foam on every bike rack, curb, crack in the sidewalk, garbage bin and discarded pallet. It would take me years to learn this place to the degree I’d known my old neighbourhood. The work would take enough time, too, that one day I’d be forced to wrap my child in foam, for her own good. I grew to understand this with every scab and fall, and with the startle from every truck that honked me out of its path. Once, I was even moved by something more surprising and painful.

The busy intersection at Main Street and Great Northern Way was a chronic problem. I had to deal with it every time I walked to the gym, or headed into the city. Its crosswalk is likely the longest in town, and cuts across four lanes of traffic at an angle. An angle. It wouldn’t give sighted folks pause, but it’s hard enough to hold a straight line when you’re blind, let alone hold a straight line on an angle.

One afternoon I stepped into the crosswalk, only to hear a car zip towards me. Its bumper scooped my knees and dropped me to the ground. The real surprise, though, was the specific bumper that hit me. It was a rear one. I’d been backed over at an intersection. From around a corner.

I got back on my feet, sore and alarmed, as the driver jumped out of his car. I half-expected him to walk backwards towards me.

“Wow,” he said. “Gotta watch where you’re going.”

Sometimes I don’t have the patience to explain my body. Instead I wound up and punted his tail light. It didn’t shatter. My sneaker just made a soft, rubbery thud. I loathed my comfortable shoes.

“Hey,” the driver said, “don’t do that.”

By this point other drivers were honking, cheering on the blind guy who was about to kick the crap out of a car. Backing over a blind man must’ve looked bad. Maybe that’s why, without a word, the driver jumped back into his car and sped away. Forwards.

I shuffled back to the loft feeling both defeated and humiliated. I made it home all right, but when I got there it didn’t feel safe and small. I was the resident of an outpost. I wanted to go home, back to the place I knew. My old neighbourhood was something to build upon. Familiar. A place for family.

What made my dream home so fantastic also made it impractical. The attraction was the same thing that made Dorian Gray’s portrait seem like a bargain. I hadn’t come here to start a family, I’d come here to live a dream of youth. But you’ve got to clear the nest of such things. You’ve got to kill your darlings to make room.

• • •

Tracy was getting ready for work one morning when she opened the bathroom door and called for me. Her voice was sharp and purposeful, a tone that indicated something was happening. We’d already dealt with a burst water pipe in the kitchen. It had flooded the loft while we were at work, and the water had run down into the closets of our neighbours. When Tracy called from the bathroom, I expected more trouble in our dream. More growing pains.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve taken the test twice.”

“The colour, did it change?”

“It’s an X or a circle.”

A father for less than thirty seconds and I was already learning interesting things.

“And it’s the good mark?” I asked.

I could hear the smile on her face.

When I hugged her, my body lit up with relief, as if we’d finally made it back after a long time away. Something in me was new. I was both older, and younger, than ever before.

The desire to move suddenly became urgent.

From the get-go Tracy’s body handled it well. By eight weeks she still had no significant morning sickness, only a touch of nausea here and there. Not that it was easy. A tiredness crept over her that would shame narcoleptics. She could sleep anytime, anywhere, in any position. No hyperbole. I mean, we’d be at the dinner table, and I’d be in mid-sentence when I’d detect a fresh, eerie silence in the room, the kind that didn’t sound to my blind man’s ears like somebody listening. I’d just carry on with dinner, and hope that she’d made it to bed this time.

The need to sleep didn’t curtail Tracy’s drive, however. A new case of nesting was well under way. As soon as we started the hunt for a more suitable home, we lucked upon a townhouse back in our old neighbourhood. It had two bedrooms, real walls and no clouds, no protective foam necessary. Situated on a street well within my spatial memory, it seemed like a helpful and safe place to grow into fatherhood, and for Tracy to trust my body with a stroller. Then again, I wasn’t sure yet how a stroller was even possible. I was already perplexed by the problem of how I would push a pram and swing my white cane at the same time. Aiming myself, the baby and the buggy would be necessary. I’m not known for my aim.

Tracy loves to move, pregnant or not, so she paced herself and organized a couple of boxes a day, or wrapped breakables in newspaper, or labelled, then alphabetized, then stacked, but only a bit at a time. Between tasks she took her vitamins, or laid her head down and snoozed beside the tape gun. Meanwhile, I talked. Or, more precisely, I talked out my anxiety.

Fatherhood, that train I heard a-comin’, had stoked a few new fires of worry in my belly— nothing specific I could name yet— but luckily the move offered something else to consider, and something productive to focus my anxiety on. Basically my paternal jitters manifested in an obsession with any irrelevant object. I fixated. I worried that something might get away. Don’t forget the egg whisk. Don’t forget the shoehorn. That sort of thing. I suspect it was a blind guy fixation, too. Nothing was in its proper spot any more. My familiar world seemed to be disappearing all over again. The hope was that it would all somehow reappear in the next apartment, safe and unbroken, so in my mind’s eye, I saw the smallest things and clung to them for hope. If my box of ear plugs made it to the next life, then surely everything else above its value and importance would arrive, including us.

To that end, I’d often lie awake at night and take inventory of our belongings, then wake Tracy and discuss what might have gone AWOL.

“Babe? You awake? Did you pack my jump rope?”

Tracy would, at most, grumble, less than pleased with my attention to detail. But I’d persist.

“I’ll just go put it on the kitchen counter, okay?”

“Whatever,” she’d say, barely stirring.

“Beside the cordless drill.”

“Uh huh.”

“Next to the meat thermometer. Can’t forget that.”

That’s pretty much how I spent the month prior to our move. Otherwise, when I wasn’t trying to keep everything in mind, I was teaching at the college.

One morning as I shaved, I was mulling over that day’s lesson plan. Even though I instruct undergraduates how to compose essays or, at the very least, to appreciate a nice sentence, I have yet to be persuaded that the world suits anything called a “thesis statement.” You just don’t find them anywhere, or at least I’ve yet to polish off anything that would prompt me to say, “Quick, Tracy! Come check out my thesis statement! I think it’s got a real handle on things!”

As I mulled over what to say on the subject, Tracy appeared at the bathroom door, smelling of perfume, ready to go to work. She spoke the first words of the day. Our thesis statement.

“I’m bleeding.”

She sounded panicky, and confused. She’d almost phrased it as a question.

“I’m sure it’s normal. I mean, isn’t that normal?”

So many things about Tracy’s body were changing that I couldn’t tell what was to be expected any more.

“No,” she said, “Bleeding now isn’t normal. It isn’t good at all. The books don’t say anything good about it.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “Let’s just call the doctor and make an appointment, just to be certain. But I’m sure it’s . . .”

Her fingers were already dialling.

By early afternoon we’d seen our doctor, we’d gone for an ultrasound, and we’d learned that the baby was gone. No heartbeat could be found. That fast, that blunt. That final. Maybe there had never been a heartbeat. We were only eight weeks pregnant. Most people— our friends and co- workers—didn’t even know.

Though miscarriage is not the final story of our family, it is the context in which my fatherhood, and Tracy’s motherhood, was born. We began in exile and flux. A painful and anxious uncertainty tempered the joy of taking the next step in our lives. Could I be a father? Would I? Should we? What were our bodies telling us, if anything? We had moved into parenthood, only to be kicked out again. Now we lived between homes, between grief and hope, life and death, restless and, to a degree, lost.

As soon as we returned home from the hospital, our old life tried to pick up where it had left off. When at your most vulnerable, reality has a way of punishing you with its banality. Are you hungry? No. But can you turn the radio on? Sure. Did you arrange the moving insurance?

In one day our pregnancy had become a parenthesis. An aside. Now closed. Still, we crawled into bed that night and slept with a question between us. How do we begin, again?

I guess you have to clear the nest. Let your darlings go. Some, to the ground.

• • •

Somewhere outside a busy Vancouver grocery store, Tracy yanked me around another bike rack. How’s a fella going to start a family if he keeps castrating himself against sidewalk amenities? That was my thought, when I heard a ringing. I’m sure a dozen other people reached into their pockets, but it was Tracy’s phone.

I couldn’t piece together who she was talking to, but somebody wanted to see us. Sooner rather than later, it seemed. When she hung up, she paused for a moment, then made a puzzled sound.

“That was the doctor’s office,” she said. “They asked to see us this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“A follow-up appointment. See how I’m doing, I guess. How we’re doing”

It sounded reasonable and caring, but unlikely. Doctors, in my experience, don’t have the time or resources to personally call up their patients. Definitely not to request a second post-miscarriage chat. Not a chance. Tracy’s pause and puzzled sound indicated that she was thinking the same thing. Not even a month had passed. We weren’t supposed to try to become pregnant again quite so soon, we already knew that. What more could there be to discuss? It’s not like we needed a doctor’s nudge about planned parenthood.

To this day, whenever I hear the page of a magazine flip, I think of pelvic exams. We were in a waiting room and waiting for one. I listened to Tracy thumb through Marie Claire while I eavesdropped on the receptionists and the other patients, all of them flipping other magazines, perhaps readying other pelvises for other examinations. I’d heard the same scene the day we confirmed we were pregnant, and again when we waited in the hospital for a d & c to remove any residual tissue from the miscarriage. It makes you think differently about the magazine industry and its audience.

When it was finally our turn, and the doctor appeared, she was quick and to the point. The exam began, then it was over. The doctor rolled back on her little stool. She read through Tracy’s file as she spoke. I could hear pages flipping. Maybe the doctor was brushing up on the new spring fashions, too. Maybe she had a pelvic exam scheduled for herself.

“You’re feeling well?” she asked.

“As well as can be expected,” Tracy said.

“And you?” the doctor asked.

“Me?” I said. “I’m okay if she’s okay.”

Pages flipped. The doctor offered no reply. I didn’t like her response. I’d set her up, but she hadn’t reassured me that I was allowed to feel all right since Tracy was fine, too.

“The tissue that we removed during the d & c was biopsied,” the doctor said. “It’s a standard procedure. The results indicate that the pregnancy was actually molar. Typically we’d have seen that on the ultrasound, but— do you know what a molar pregnancy is?”

We blanked.

“I should clarify that yours was what we consider a partial molar,” added the doctor.

Good, I thought. Things were only half as bad as they seemed. Or partially as bad.

“Basically,” the doctor continued, “in your case the egg was fertilized by two sperm.”

Tracy and I had the same thought, but just one of us said something about twins.

“No,” the doctor said, “Unfortunately the chromosomes are doubled, and that causes the problem. It creates these cells, these molar cells. We intervened in your miscarriage very early. That’s possibly why we didn’t see the presence of these cells on the ultrasound, too.”

“Why is it called a molar pregnancy?” I asked. “As in teeth?”

The doctor laughed. This hadn’t been my intention.

“It has nothing to do with teeth, at least not as far as I know,” she said.

Medical metaphors are perplexing. Often they don’t make clear pictures in a person’s mind. Like most people, I suspect, I like to have a picture in my mind. Of most things, at least. Ever had an episode of the sitcom Full House described to you? I rest my case.

“What does molar mean, then?” I asked. “Where does it come from?”

“You know,” the doctor said, “I can’t honestly say. I think it’s— well— no, I can’t say I know why. Good question.”

I like to figure these things out, so I pressed.

“Well, what about a mole? Is it something to do with the cells and how they behave? Are they, you know, mole-like?”

“Could be.”

She didn’t sound convinced. Not of anything other than she had a metaphor-fixated patient.

“But there must be some reason they call it that. I mean, why would you use a term like molar if—”

I could feel that Tracy was kicking me in her mind with an imaginary steel-toed boot, telling me to can it. I let the metaphor go. If a molar pregnancy meant something could be burrowing, I doubted Tracy wanted to know.

That’s when my gal cut through semantics to the real stuff.

“So what does this mean?” she said.

The doctor seemed relieved to be back on scientific turf, away from its language.

“Yes,” she said, and clapped Tracy’s file shut, “what it means is this: we need you to have a few blood tests over the next couple of weeks. That’s all. We watch the growth hormone levels in your body. Since you’re no longer pregnant, they should go down.”

“And if they don’t?” Tracy asked. Her voice was stone.

“If some of the molar cells remain, and if they’re dividing, the hormone levels will rise. More there, more to feed, see?”

For once I could see. What she was describing was a cellular infestation. I’m surprised nobody had worded it that way.

Tracy sat in a chair opposite me. She was just far enough away that I couldn’t reach for her hand, or pat her thigh, or offer something, without drawing attention to the gesture. She’s proud and reserved. I decided to let her be, to protect at least that much.

“What we need to do is take some blood today and take some next week, to monitor that your levels are going down. Typically they do.”

“And if they don’t,” Tracy asked. Her stone voice had a quiver now. Earthquake.

“Not to worry,” the doctor said. A flash of teeth caged her words. “There are a variety of options. We’ll visit those in the exceptional circumstance that we need to. It is treatable. Really, it’s very unlikely, though.”

“How unlikely?” I asked.

“The chances are very, very remote. About five percent.”

“And how common is a molar pregnancy?” I asked.

“Oh, maybe one in a thousand.”

Numbers of this order are intended to reassure people, but I had yet to experience much relief. Here was a physician telling us that we’d already gone from the wrong side of a typical one-in-fifteen chance of miscarriage, to the short straw on a one-in-a-thousand chance of a cellular disorder. Now we were crapshooting a one-in-twenty chance of something else. It seemed to me that every time we participated in something rare, our chances of getting rarer increased.

I’d like to believe there’s safety in numbers, but there isn’t. Put it this way. If you have a one-in-a-million chance of dying in a plane crash, statistics would definitely be on your side if you planned to wear a bear costume and ride a unicycle to your seat. That should be better odds of survival than a parachute, right? I mean, what are the chances of a person in a bear costume, one with a unicycle in the overhead storage bin, dying in a plane crash? As rare as they get.

If numbers really worked that way, rather than waiting for Tracy’s ninety-five percent chance of those pernicious little cells suffering a hormone famine, we should have been out pricing unicycles after we left the doctor’s office. Another health insurance, you might say.

Two blood tests later, we learned that Tracy’s hormone levels were rising, not diminishing. Her body thought she was pregnant, but she wasn’t. Cells were dividing. We went into full alarm. We were also officially beyond the realm of our general practitioner’s skill. An appointment was made for us with a specialist. He was, from what Tracy told me, a tidy and charming young man whose hands gestured as he spoke, his gestures made with equal articulation.

I don’t remember what was said first, or how we directed our small talk to some hard information about what options we faced. I do recall, however, that we rocketed to the fact there was one option and only one.

“Chemotherapy,” he said. “You’ll need to begin treatment right away.”

A placenta is a miraculous and peculiar creation. It effectively behaves like a benign cancer, attaching itself to a woman’s system, feeding off it, and growing. But, being benign, a placenta is also programmed to detach. To destroy itself, unlike a cancer. These cells, these molar cells, were related to the placenta. They didn’t know when to quit, though, and so they grew, and fed, and grew, and if left to themselves would spread to the brain and lungs. Not cancer, but cancer-like. Lethal, albeit vulnerable.

“I would guess it will take a treatment or two,” the gynecologist said. “The sooner the better. The less we’re treating, the less treatment necessary.”

Two weeks later, the morning of Tracy’s first treatment, we called a taxi. When the yellow blur pulled up to our house, I was saddened, struck by a sharp, then deflating sensation. I couldn’t drive my wife to the cancer clinic. She’d be in no condition to drive herself home, either, so here we were, inviting a stranger along, into a place that had no room for strangers. I would have given my hearing to be able to drive that day.

In the back seat we were surrounded by bags. Our arms were filled with Tracy’s pillows, some home-cooked food, books, needlepoint, Sudoku collections, and a portable DVD player, among other things. She was only going overnight, but the intensity of what she would experience asked for more distraction and comfort than a week away from home in any other circumstances. As I shut the cab door, I gave the driver instructions.

“We’re going to the BC Cancer Agency,” I said. “Do you know where that is?”

He did. He’d delivered blood there before. As we drove, all of us silent, Tracy caught the cabbie’s eyes as he glanced into his rear-view mirror. He was looking at me. His eyes were filled with sympathy—Tracy said others would do this, too. The same look was visited upon me by folks at the cancer agency lobby, as well as the families and friends of other patients who passed us in the hallway as we searched for the nurse’s station. Everybody saw a blind, bald man and assumed there was cancer behind my hairstyle. Perhaps behind my blindness.

But I was glad when Tracy told me about the looks. I decoyed attention from her. I could do so little for her now, so I was happy to have the job of a red-herring patient. I absorbed the pity for her. It was one less toxicity, maybe.

In a narrow room, at the end of a long, disinfected hallway, we were guided to a bed by a chipper and quick nurse. Tracy shared the room with a Chinese woman who occupied the only other bed, half-hidden behind a curtain. The woman’s nurse and her family were circled around the bed, and in a flap about something. The Price Is Right blasted from the tiny TV above them. Tracy changed and climbed into her own bed, then began arranging her things for the overnight stay.

Soon the picture of what was happening next door came into focus. As Tracy unpacked, I listened to the next-bed woman’s family. They struggled to translate a nurse’s questions and instructions. Between short bursts of Chinese, the woman moaned in pain. The room smelled stale and heavy. Sour and hot. It would only thicken over the day. This was breakfast time. This was a fresh new start.

Our chipper nurse finished taking Tracy’s vitals, and began to insert an IV drip into her wrist. This would be the delivery mechanism for the chemo. But the needle seemed to be giving some trouble, then a lot of trouble. The nurse was on her third attempt at finding a vein when the situation next door reached a boiling point. The neighbouring nurse was flustered, as was the family. The nurse spoke slow and loud.

“Has she been vomiting, or experiencing diarrhea?”

The family spoke among themselves. The woman moaned.

“Vomiting?” The nurse repeated. “Tummy upset?”

“Maybe I’ll have to try the other arm,” Tracy’s nurse said. “This one won’t seem to take.”

She pricked Tracy again, where four previous holes were already abandoned and swollen.

A wave of panic broke from the family around the next bed.

“No!” the Chinese woman’s nurse shouted. “No getting up. You must tell her to stay in bed. She kept getting up last night and— no, down, in bed, please!”

“She go bathroom,” a family member said. “She was bathroom. She is gone.”

Folks scrambled for a bedpan. Tracy tried to focus her attention somewhere else. Her own end of the room wasn’t a viable option. The nurse was on her sixth attempt at finding a vein.

“We need to get you to relax,” she said, both frustrated and apologetic. “When our bodies are stressed, they defend themselves. Veins dive down further from the surface. It’s a form of self-protection. Yours are pretty defensive.”

The chaos next to us focused on arranging the family around the woman to help lift her into a wheelchair, to take her to a bathroom. It wasn’t happening, though, because the woman was too frail, or too upset. Tracy was upset, too. Her bruised and bleeding arms were wrapped in thick hot towels in an attempt to coax her veins back to the surface. She said she felt like a perversion of the Michelin man.

Around the time Tracy’s IV finally took, a woman approached the bed. She had a thick Scottish accent, comforting like good stew, and I caught a broad glint of light from her chest. I thought it could be an amulet, not a stethoscope. This was Tracy’s oncologist. She’d prepared the day’s cocktail, and was here to prepare Tracy for the twelve-hour infusion.

I was wary of this doctor from the get-go, although I had no reason to be. My fears attached themselves to the oncologist’s necklace. Why did she wear an amulet? I didn’t want the person responsible for curing my wife to also dabble in the powers of symbols and magic tokens. I felt the same conflict about the airline mechanic who told me the Big Bang never happened, since it wasn’t spoken of in the Bible. Who wants to fly in a plane maintained by a denier of physics? I had a bad feeling. A protective, bad feeling.

The Chinese woman wept. Her family consoled her.

Like me, this woman’s family was here, but exiled from what was happening inside someone they loved. Our bodies enforce a remoteness from one another, a barrier that we spend our lives trying to break through in a variety of ways. We send our voices across a room. A look. We ask for long embraces. We reserve the physical intimacy of touch, taste and smell for so few. For two people lucky enough, a baby bridges and binds the molecular gap between them. We grow close, as they say. Atomic.

Perhaps Tracy’s oncologist, alert to the despair and suffering from the next bed, understood that we were struggling not to see it as our story, too, and how this chapter could end. Whatever cued her, I can say for certain she then gave us the best and most difficult request we’d had from any medical practitioner, albeit a counter-intuitive prescription.

“Let me ask that you do one thing for me, and for yourselves, “ she said. “I don’t want you to identify with any of the other patients here.”

She let the admonition sing for a moment before qualifying her advice.

“You are not them. You don’t have cancer. Chemotherapy just happens to be the effective therapy for molar tissue. It will work, one hundred percent. You will not lose your hair, you will not need radiation or surgery, and when it is over and you are well, you can go on to have a healthy family. I’ll say it again if you like— you will be fine, no question.”

With that, just before Tracy’s infusion began, I remember an incredible lift. For the first time in all of this, a doctor had given us some certainty, and its specific kind of relief. Chemo would be hell on Tracy, no question, but she would be fine. Little, but enough. Few can give that much.

Whenever the doctor came around, she was so casual, cheerful. Certain. Her amulet was bright and cut through the smear of my eyes, and I was happy to catch it.

We reminded ourselves of what the doctor had said whenever things got hard, whenever doubts crept in. A child was possible. We’d have to wait a year before we could try again, to ensure the cells did not return, but that’s all. A year’s down time. The incubation of a pause. It felt like a promise, if we kept it in that light.

The suggested couple of treatments swelled to three, then tipped to four as Tracy’s levels continued to rise. But the amulet also continued to catch light whenever it came around to see how she was doing. After that, five treatments seemed to be the magic number. Then it was revised to six. Finally her levels peaked and began their decline. We hung on to science and certainty, the clarity of the words. “You’ll be fine,” I reminded my gal. “Just a little more to go.”

During her first day of treatment, I sat beside Tracy, we talked, we watched movies and, when she was tired, she slept and I listened to her breathing. Sometimes she’d ask me to get her juice, so I’d open my cane and tap around until I found a nurse who could guide me to a vending machine, or I’d grope about to find one myself on the next floor, or follow noises to the cafeteria for change. In the elevator, if I was alone, I felt nervous and urgent. I had to get back fast, be faster. Be there. Not get lost.

After what seemed an eternity of hallways and closets and wrong turns, I offered the juice to Tracy’s outstretched hand. My own small amulet. My own token of apology for feeling I’d done this to her. Then she restarted the DVD, told me what was going on, and sipped her drink, nursing the gap between us. Us and a family we’d imagined.