Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt Read Free Book Online Page A

the lack of specialization, and I silently reproach him for not being ambitious enough to have pursued funding, for giving up once I pulled the financial plug.
    “I have to get going too,” Charlotte adds. “We don’t have Sasha’s boho schedule.”
    “Why are you so angry?” I shout, and I startle her into looking me straight in the eye. Her brow creases as though she will cry, and I see the little girl again.
    “Dad,” she says and, despite my very real animosity, I want to hold her. She says nothing more, and I wonder if she finds my need for her to be kind to me right now repulsive.
    “I don’t think she feels this like you’re imagining,” I say. “Dr. Mead said that confabulators believe what they’re saying. She’s not confused; she doesn’t think she’s making anything up. She just reacts to our faces looking confused, like we don’t believe her.”
    “That’s right,” Fred confirms. “It’s only because we look like we don’t believe her that she has trouble.”
    “But she’s so far away.” Charlotte’s voice is strained.
    “No, no, she’s not,” I say, remembering the way the lust rose between us as I lay beside her, and I picture her face against her pillow—a face asking for all dreams to come true.Anna had been closer to me then than she’d been in years.
    “You like that she has the wrong memories,” Charlotte says finally, and I feel the clawing of family spiders at our necks: the net-casting tricksters whose silky threads never let us forget for long just how strongly we are bound to one another. Finally I understand what Charlotte has been getting at.
    “I’ll ask for the bill,” Fred says.
    “And I’ll meet you outside,” Charlotte says, standing up.
    “And I’m waiting for Sasha,” I tell Fred.
    But Sasha doesn’t arrive before I need to leave to pick up Anna from the hospital. I find myself taking Charlotte’s side about my daughter’s bohemian schedule.
    “You look beautiful,” I say to Anna as I glance over at her in the passenger seat. The traffic has come to a halt as we turn onto the ramp for Highway 400 to head north. In the summer, even on weekdays, this highway is crammed with people headed to cottages or campsites.
    She looks over at me, smiles and nods.
    I took her skating once, at City Hall. She didn’t know how to skate and held onto me for balance. I made a show of teaching her, and forced her to loosen her grip, as I checked around us to see if anyone was watching
.
    I notice that the hair at Anna’s temple, and a swash of it from her forehead up along the part, is grey. Her roots are overtaking her monthly tint and I wonder if she hasnoticed and doesn’t care about hair anymore, or about eyebrows or waxing, or her weight, which has stayed a perfect 135 pounds even after three children. She is toned for a woman her age, and up until a few weeks ago was cycling and swimming regularly.
    She rushes, on the inside, my Anna. She surges with the force of a current—not water and not electric, but like air: the updraft that carries a wing.
    The traffic begins to move again and we pick up speed.
    “Are you disappointed?” I say.
    She looks at me with a furrowed brow that asks,
by what?
    And now I regret my question, but I have to follow through. I try to give her the question and answer together. “That the embolization can’t be done in your case because of the position of the aneurysm.”
    “I’m disappointed that they didn’t give the anaesthetic, though. It hurt a great deal, that operation, and when the goat knocked over the fence and the pole fell on me, it really stung, and so it would have helped if they’d given me the proper medication. They never do, though, this is what I’ve heard. The rain comes and the goats just trample over everything.”
    “Goats? How many?” I ask. The animals are back, and I don’t know what gets into me—whether it is perversion or honest pleasure—but I want to follow her words. I want to be out