Adult Onset Read online

  Also by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

  Fall On Your Knees

  The Way the Crow Flies

  Belle Moral

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2014 A.M. MacDonald Holdings Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacDonald, Ann-Marie, author

  Adult onset / Ann-Marie MacDonald.

  www.annmariemacdonald.com

  ISBN 978-0-345-80827-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80829-5

  I. Title.

  PS8575.D38A63 2014 C813′.54 C2014-902057-0

  Cover design by Kelly Hill

  Cover images: (balloon) © Susil, (tulip) © frescomovie, (background) © Tomas Jasinskis, all Shutterstock.com

  v3.1

  For the Children

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Monday: Dreams of an Everyday Housewife

  Tuesday: If a Leaf Falls in a Fracture, Does Anyone Hear?

  Wednesday: I’m a Baby. I Can Drive Your Car. (And Maybe You’ll Love Me.)

  Thursday: Cooks Irritated

  Friday: Remembered Pain

  Saturday: Swerve

  Sunday: A Long Follow-Up

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  About the Author

  The solitary bone cyst has not yet revealed all its secrets … The SBC still remains mysterious in many of its aspects. At the time of this writing, nobody can predict the occurrence modalities of this benign bone tumor. In a similar way, the reality of this tumor-like lesion cannot be precisely described. Alas, solitary bone cyst was supposed to be a lesion in children that disappeared after growth ended. Is it still true since some cases have been reported more recently in adults? This study represents a long follow-up.

  “Solitary bone cyst: controversies and treatment.”

  H. Bensahel, P. Jehanno, Y. Desgrippes, G.F. Pennecot, Service de Chirurgie Orthopédique Hôpital Robert Debré, Paris, France

  MONDAY

  Dreams of an Everyday Housewife

  In the midway of this, our mortal life, Mary Rose MacKinnon is at her cheerful kitchen table checking e-mail. It is Monday. Her two-year-old is busy driving a doll stroller into the baseboard, so she has a few minutes.

  Your 99 friends are waiting to join you on Facebook. She deletes it, flinches at another invitation to appear at a literary festival, skims her five-year-old’s school newsletter online and signs up to accompany his class to the reptile museum. She skips guiltily over unanswered messages and cute links sent by friends—including one from her brother that shows a fat woman whose naked torso looks like Homer Simpson’s face—and is about to close it down when her laptop bings in time with the oven and the incoming e-mail catches her eye. It is highlighted in queasy cyber yellow and bears a dialogue box: Mail thinks this is junk. She eyes it gingerly, fearing a virus or another ad for Viagra. It is from some joker—as her father would say—with the address [email protected] and in the subject line:

  Some things really do get batter …

  A baking newsletter from a mad housewife? She bites, and clicks.

  Hi Mister,

  Mum and I just watched the video entitled “It Gets Better” and I thought I’d try out the new e-mail to tell you how proud we are that you and Hilary are such good role models for young people who may be struggling against prejudice.

  Love,

  Dad

  PS: Hope this gets to you. Just got the e-mail installed yesterday.

  I am now officially no longer a “Cybersaur”! Off to “surf the net” now.

  My goodness.

  She types:

  Dear Dad,

  Congratulations and welcome to the twenty-first century!

  No, that sounds sarcastic. Delete.

  Dear Dad,

  Welcome to the digital age! And thanks, it means a lot to me that you and Mum saw the video and that it means a lot to you that

  She is proud that he is proud. And that he is proud that Mum is proud; of whom Mary Rose is also proud. Sigh. She does not like screens, convinced as she is they have some sort of neurologically hazing effect. She ought to write her father an actual card with an actual pen to let him know how much this means to her. She gets up and slides a tray of vine-ripened tomatoes into the oven to slow-roast—they are from Israel, is that wrong?

  “Ow. Careful, Maggie.”

  “No,” croons the child in reply.

  She returns to the table, its bright non-toxic vinyl IKEA cloth obscured by bills and reminders for service calls she needs to book for the various internal organs of her house. Bing! Your 100 friends are waiting … A month or so ago she tripped on a root in cyberspace and accidentally joined Facebook; now she can’t figure out how to unjoin. She has visited her page once, its silhouette of a human head empty but for a question mark at the centre, awaiting her picture, like an unetched tombstone—we know you’re coming … eventually. Her unadorned wall was full of names, many of which she did not recognize, some of which bore the rank odour of the crypt of high school. What is this mania for keeping in touch? she wonders. Mary Rose MacKinnon is unused to continuity. She grew up in a family that moved every few years until she was a teenager, and each time it was as if everything and everyone vanished behind them. Or entered a different realm, a mythic one wherein time stopped, the children she had known never grew older and, as in a cartoon, people and places retained the same clothes and aspect day after day, regardless of weather, explosions or being shot by Elmer Fudd. She would not change a thing, however, each move having brought with it a sense of renewal; as though she had outrun a shameful past—starting at age three. Nowadays, she reflects, no one is allowed to outrun anything. If one kid slugs another in the park, they’re packed off to therapy.

  Delete.

  People used to joke about Xeroxed newsletters sent by relentlessly chipper housewives at Christmas. Their effect, and perhaps their purpose, was to make everyone who received them feel bad about their own lives. Nowadays people torture one another online with pictures of their golden-retriever lifestyles and tweets about must-see plays in New York with one-word titles, new restaurants in Toronto with four tables, human rights abuses in China and the truth behind the down duvet industry. Where is the meadow of yesteryear? Whither the sound of one insect scaling a stalk of grass? The time-silvered fence post in the afternoon sun? What has become of time itself in its expansive, unparcelled state, uncorseted by language? Where have all the tiny eternities gone? Gone to urgencies, every one.

  As she types this e-mail to her father, icebergs are evaporating and falling as rain on her February garden, where a water-boarded tulip has foolishly put its head up—are things getting better or worse? Bing! Matthew is invited to Eli’s Big Boy Birthday Party! Click here to view your e-vite! A birthday part
y at some obscure suburban facility north of Yonge and the 401, do these parents have no compassion? She peers into the depths of info and goodies! trying to find a date and time amid exploding balloons and floating dinosaurs.

  She used to console herself with the notion that the human species would burn itself out like a virus and Earth would recover Her bounty and diversity. But that was before she became a mother.

  Nowadays? How old is she? No one says nowadays nowadays. She’ll be making references to the Great Depression before she knows it.

  It is April, today is the first—though anyone might be forgiven for getting the months muddled considering it did rain all through February. She wonders if that impacted the usual February suicide rate. Impacted did not used to be a verb. Sometime in the nineties it got verbed, like so many other unsuspecting nouns.

  Dear Dad,

  I

  “It Gets Better” is an online video project aimed at supporting Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered and Queer youth in response to a recent spate of suicides and assaults. Healthy adults speak into the camera and share stories of how desperate they were when, as younger people, they suffered the hatred of their peers, their parents and, worst of all, themselves. Each story ends with the assurance that “it gets better.” Hilary watched it and cried. Mary Rose didn’t need to watch the whole thing, she got the point and thought it was wonderful, etc.… It has been shown in schools, even some churches, ordinary people the world over have been watching it. There are even people in Russia and Iran watching it. But the evolutionary layers that have led Dolly and Duncan MacKinnon to watch it constitute a sedimentary journey as unlikely as the emergence of intelligent life itself. At least that is how it strikes Mary Rose for, although things have been just fine—more than fine, wonderful—between her and her parents for years now, they weren’t always. So she is all the more impressed that they are, at their advanced age, making connections between the daughter they love and an actual social issue. The cursor blinks.

  The sound of splashing brings her to her feet.

  “Maggie, no, sweetheart, that’s Daisy’s water.”

  She bends and pulls the child gently back from the dog dish.

  “No!”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “Aisy.”

  “Is Daisy thirsty?”

  “Me!”

  “Are you being Daisy?”

  Maggie dives for the dog bowl and gets in a slurp before Mary Rose lifts it to the counter.

  “No!” cries the child with a clutch at her mother’s right buttock.

  Mary Rose fills a sippy cup with filtered water from the fridge dispenser and hands it to Maggie. The child launches it across the floor. The mother escalates with the offer of jam on a rice cake. The child, after a dangerous pause, accepts. Détente. Another placated potentate. The mother returns to her laptop. Ask not for whom the cursor blinks …

  The phone rings. A long-distance ring. She feels adrenalin spurt in the pit of her stomach. A glance at the display dispels the faint hope that it might be Hilary calling from out west. It is her mother. She stares at the phone, cordless but no less umbilical for that. She can’t talk to her mother right now, she is busy formulating a fitting reply to her father’s e-mail. Her father, who always had time for her. Ring-ring! Her father, who never raised his voice; whose faith in her gifts allowed her to achieve liftoff from the slough of despond of childhood—and grow up to write books about the slough of despond of childhood. Ring-ring! Besides, talking on the phone works like a red flag on Maggie; Mary Rose will wind up having to cut the call short and there will go her precious scrap of time to deal with e-mail and all manner of domestic detritus before grocery shopping, then picking up Matthew and then hurrying home to purée the slow-roasted tomatoes into an “easy rustic Tuscan sauce.” Ring-ring!

  On the other hand, maybe her father is dead and this is the phone call for which she has been bracing all her life … His lovely e-mail will end up having been his last words to her. Maybe that’s what killed him—he finally got in touch with his emotions and now he is dead. And it is her fault. Unless her mother is dead and it is her father calling, which has always seemed less likely—Dad rarely makes phone calls. Besides, in the event of an emergency, her parents would phone her older sister, Maureen, and Maureen would phone Mary Rose. She breathes. Her parents are safe and sound in their sublet condo in Victoria, where they spend the mild west coast winters close to her big sister and her family.

  No sooner has she allowed it to ring through to voice mail, however, than she experiences another spurt of fear: it might indeed be Maureen calling … from their parents’ condo. Mo visits daily and perhaps she arrived this morning to find both their parents dead—one from a stroke, the other from a heart attack brought on by discovering the deceased spouse. Though her neocortex deems this unlikely, Mary Rose’s hand, being on closer terms with her amygdala, is already cold as she picks up the phone and, feeling like the traitor she is, presses flash so as to screen the call just in case someone isn’t dead. Her mother’s big rich voice chops through. “You’re not there! I just called”—here she bursts into song—“to say, I love you!”

  From the floor, Maggie cries, “Sitdy!”—this being Arabic for grandmother because nothing in Mary Rose’s life is simple—and reaches for the phone. Mary Rose could kick herself. She presses end, cutting her mother off mid-warble with a stab of guilt, but hands Maggie the phone to stave off a complete toddler meltdown and feels even guiltier since it is rather like handing the child an empty candy wrapper. Maggie pushes buttons, trying to retrieve “Sitdy!” An urgent beeping gives way to the implacable female automaton, “Please hang up and try your call again.”

  Maggie responds with a stream of toddler invective.

  “Please hang up … now,” commands the voice, cool and beyond supplication, as though the speaker has witnessed too many of one’s crimes to be moved now by one’s cries. “This is a recording.”

  “Maggie, give Mumma the phone, sweetheart.”

  “No!” Still frantically pressing buttons. She is a beautiful child, dimples and sparkly hazel eyes. She does everything fast, runs everywhere, and her curls have an electromagnetic life of their own.

  “Sitdy’s gone, honey, she hung up.” Another deception.

  “Hello?” A female voice, but neither a frosty recording nor the jolly gollywoggle of Sitdy, it is—

  “Mummy!” cries Maggie, phone jammed to the side of her head. “Hi, hi!”

  “Give Mumma the phone, Maggie. Maggie, give it to me.”

  “No!” she screams. “Mummy!” She runs away down the hall.

  Hilary’s going to think I’m beating our child—“Hil!” she calls in pursuit, tripping over the stroller, slipping on something viscous—dog bile—“Maggie speed-dialed by accident!”

  “That’s okay,” comes Hil’s voice, tinny but merry through the phone. “How are you, Maggie Muggins?”

  Maggie holes up under the piano bench in the living room. “I love you, Mummy.” Hil is Mummy to Mary Rose’s Mumma—the latter’s claim to “ethnicity” on her Lebanese mother’s side informing her designation, and Hilary’s WASP heritage reflected in hers.

  She retreats to the kitchen table—Hilary can always hang up if she has to—now is her chance to frame a worthy reply to her father’s enlightened and loving e-mail. She takes a breath. Of course it would be Dad who would appreciate the socio-political importance of the video—he was always the rational one, the one who sat still and read books, the one who saw her intelligence shining like a beacon through the fog of her early school failures. What can she say that will encompass how grateful she is, how much she loves him? Love. The word is like a red bird she catches mid-flight, “Dad, look what I got you!” Look, before I have to let it go! He isn’t just her father, he was her saviour. She has written this in cards to him in the past, but she can’t have said it quite right because he never offers much indication that he has received them—he’ll greet her with
the usual smile and pat on the head but never say, “I got your note.” She once asked him, “Did you get my note?” He nodded absently, “Mm-hm,” then asked how her work was going. At these times it was as if he were coated in something pristine but impenetrable. Perhaps she had crossed the line in presuming to tell him he was a wonderful father. Are her notes too emotional? Mushy was the word when she was a kid. Regardless of how she words them, she always feels there is something fevered in her letters; as though she were writing from the heart of some disaster in which he is implicated—from a hospital bed or a war zone, from death row. The kind of letter haunted by an unwritten qualifier: in spite of.

  Dear Dad,

  I was touched to deceive

  Delete.

  I wery much appreciated your

  Delete.

  Thank your for you note. I love you and your message feels very healing

  Delete.

  “Ow!”

  The child has hung up the phone on her foot. “Sowwy”—sly smile, all curls and creamy cheeks.

  Mary Rose heads to the hall closet, where she takes Tickle Me Elmo down from the shelf—he sings and does the chicken dance when you press his foot, they have two of them, both gifts from childless friends—sets the fuzzy red imp on the kitchen floor. She wipes up the dog slime, fills a non-BPA plastic “snack trap” with peeled, cut-up organic grapes and thrusts it at her child. She feels like Davy Crockett at the Alamo—that oughta hold ’em for a few minutes. Maggie presses Elmo’s foot and he erupts with an invitation to do the chicken dance. Mary Rose returns to her laptop, tight in the chest, annoyed that she seems suddenly to be annoyed for no reason.

  Dear Dad,

  There is not a single aspect of her life that is not of her own choosing. She has nothing to complain about and much to be grateful for. For which to be grateful, corrects her inner grammarian. She came out when homosexuality was still classed as a mental illness by the World Health Organization, otherwise known as the WHO (Me?). She helped change the world to the point where it-got-better enough for her to be here now at her own kitchen table with her own child, legally married to the woman she loves, feeling like a trapped 1950s housewife. That was a glib thought. Unjust. Unfeminist. Her life is light years away from her own mother’s. Maggie is flapping her arms along with Elmo and drowning out the music, “I can flap!” For one thing, unlike her mother, Mary Rose led a whole other life before getting married and having children; a bohemian trajectory that spanned careers as actor, TV writer and, ultimately, author of “Young Adult” fiction. MR MacKinnon is known for her “sensitive evocations” of childhood and “uncanny portrayals” of children. Her first book, JonKitty McRae: Journey to Otherwhere, is about an eleven-year-old girl who discovers a twin brother in a parallel universe—in her world, Kitty has no mother, but in his, Jon has no father … It was a surprise crossover bestseller, a hit with young and “old” adults alike. The momentum carried through to the second, JonKitty McRae: Escape from Otherwhere. Together they are known as the Otherwhere Trilogy—although she has yet to write the third.