A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [15]
It was Andrew’s voice that now fuelled the engine of this car, his voice that pushed down on the accelerator, his voice that chose the distance, the speed, the direction.
She slept on the train, slept as she often did when confronted by noise and unfamiliarity, willing stimuli to move away from her until a curtain of dark dreamlessness closed across the scene. She awoke an hour or so later in a swaying interior to the sight of the tattered edges of the city under a cold blue sky. Sunlight was pushing past the dust on the window, covering her hands and lap, and making her uncomfortably warm in her good wool coat and her winter boots. Someone rustled a newspaper behind her. Someone else across the way was buttoning the coat of a squirming child. A uniformed man careered down the aisle shouting the name of the city as if, without this announcement, no one would notice it was there, as if it would slip by, ignored. The city was not something she was going to be able to ignore. She was going to have to enter it. She was going to have to manage.
After walking stiffly along the cement quay, her purse in one hand, her suitcase in the other, she descended a flight of marble stairs, then walked up a long, sloping ramp into the great hall of Union Station, remembering that as a child she had been led by her mother into this overwhelming world for a series of appointments deep in the city, and that the child she had been had often refused to move through the huge room until she had read, high on its walls, all the carved names of places that did not exist on the maps of her County. Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg: unfamiliar, foreign-sounding names that would be forever associated in her mind with the disturbing cacophony of the trains and the portentous, smooth atmosphere, the hushed tone of the appointments.
The doctor she was being taken to see had an office at Sick Children’s Hospital, an office in which he kept a dollhouse with three dolls that he wanted her to play with. “Why not call the lady doll Mommy,” she remembered him saying, “and the man doll Daddy? The littlest doll can be you.” All of this had confused and disoriented her. She had never liked dolls and could not understand why this man wanted her to pretend the small figures were her parents or herself. She developed ways to shut out the doctor, her mother, the dollhouse: she could think about china horses, for instance, or the County atlas she had memorized, or she could let a succession of rhymes play in her mind. Eventually she learned how to disregard the enormous hospital itself and all the pyjama-clad children who lived there. “Sick Kids,” she had heard her mother call it when talking on the phone. “Robert hopes the doctor at Sick Kids can do something,” she would say, adding ominously but also almost hopefully, “She might have to be admitted.”
She had always believed that this admission had something to do with confession, that the fact of her would have to be confessed, that she would have to be admitted to, or would herself have to admit to some crime or another. And, indeed, once she was in the presence of the doctor, his soft questions had always seemed like an interrogation, an attempt to pry from her some sort of dark revelation. She had remained resolutely silent, however; she hadn’t admitted anything, even though she knew her punishment would be her mother’s anger, her mother’s refusal to look at her all the way home on the train. And later, when she lay in her room facing the wall, she would hear the adult argument begin, her own name tossed back and forth between her mother and father long into the night.
She was fifty-three years old now and had never been alone in a city before. Still, since childhood, she had been an expert map-reader and, after finding the name and address in the city phonebook kept in her town library, and marking the location on a map, she had believed that, at least in the matter of way-finding, she