Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt Read Free Book Online Page B

there with her and her goats in the rain.
    “Six or seven. They’re cunning, but you know, so sweet, almost like dogs. The black fur barking digging dogs in Harewick.”
    “Harewick?”
    “In Sussex—headless dogs.”
    “And the goats? Are they headless?”
    “You’re being silly,” she says angrily and looks over at me. She thinks I’m playing with her damaged frontal lobe. “Make the cart less heavy and shuffle the wheels so it runs straight, with bright pink magnifying glasses. There’s no poem for the poor old foot.”
    I nearly step on the brake, but there is too much traffic. I have to keep going. No animals, but she has said something that feels obscenely familiar. Then she’s off again.
    “The fleecing child came back. The one with the yellow hair and the slanted eyes. Do you remember her? She wanted to take our cake that day at the picnic. She was so thin. Her cold eating bones, her makeshift chariot. She brought the beans—it was her.”
    “Anna,” I say to interrupt her, and to stop my dreadful feeling of shame for having started this.
    “Wet, sarcastic hibiscus,” she says, and when I glance over at her I see that she has three fingers up, having counted each of the words. Wet. Sarcastic. Hibiscus. Confident she has been successful, she peers out the window. I wonder if she’s seeing something I should take note of.
    The bubble in my wife’s brain has put her in the very act of living rather than the ordering of it. Language is the action itself. I am desperate to be as alive as that. But I am a slave. Guilt—not gilt—chains. If I tell her, then maybe they’ll drop away from me. If I tell her, there might only be us, together.
    We finish the drive in silence and arrive home to the quiet of our land, which hums with insects and the reach-reach of the growing crops and the weeds that surround them. It’s only five o’clock, and the endless July evening stretches out awkwardly before me. My desire to toy with Anna’s mind is as strong as my wish to understand it, so it’s best to avoid her.
    I take a long, meandering walk through the asparagus field, now rid of its spurs and gone wild with tall, frolicking ferns. I find myself at the edge of the cornfield. I breathe in deeply. There’s a smell to the stalks of corn that is erotic, but it’s a childhood lust. I enter the field and walk along the rows carved out by the plough, in among the stalks that shove me side to side, nudging me to feel disgust, or sorrow, at all I have never become. But I resist their bullying and walk straight through, until I reach the other side.
    I do not get lost.

    I pick another row and do the same thing, walk straight through, and I think about what Dr. Mead told me when he gave us the original diagnosis. The aneurysm is only a symptom of something else. Some of its possible causes are brain tumour, trauma, a genetic disease that affects collagen, or polycystic kidney disease. These causes obviously range in degrees of seriousness, and will be tested for, but there was one other possible cause I haven’t been able to shake from my thoughts, one that has haunted me: infectious material from the heart.

    I leave the corn to its humming and return to the house. Resolved. Intent.
    Upon removing my shoes in the hall entrance, I hear a whisper. Then an intake of breath less urgent than a gasp. The whirring of the washing machine in the final stagesof the cycle muffles the sound. Our machine is modern, European-designed, and very, very fast; I follow its hum.
    When I arrive at the laundry room door I stop just before I might come into view. I see her leg, her thigh, with her other leg curled over it in a squeeze, forming a crest at her sex. Her hand is cupped over the muff of hair there and it works in rhythm with the spin of the washer. Her legs tense and relax. Tense and relax. I step forward and peek around the doorframe into the room and gaze at Anna’s face, as it concentrates on the spin, and