The Man Who Can't Be Moved

My mom’s never been a die hard Catholic; much to her own mother’s dismay she never used to force us into our Sunday best and drag us off the church two or three times every weekend and she never made the Bible mandatory reading before ‘lights out’. While we’d gone to Catholic schools all of our lives and we’d been subjected to wearing the boring uniforms day in and day out and we’d each spent a year serving as altar boys when we hit grade eight -our grandmother ranted and raved about the fact that we had to commit ‘service to the Lord’ before we went through our confirmations- the majority of our religious education had been through the nuns that taught our classes and my grandparents’ -on both sides- heavy preaching whenever we paid them a visit. Mom on the other hand is what my brothers and I call a closet Christian; a cross around her neck yet a litany of profanities every day of the week save for Sunday. Growing up she was never a bible thumper and a ‘fire and brimstone, you’ll go to hell if you don’t follow each and every rule’ yet she made us each fish every Friday, dragged us to Midnight Mass to remind us of the ‘true meaning of Christmas’ and never failed -when we were kids and still believing in the Easter Bunny- to let us know that it wasn’t just about the chocolate that we received.

Yet today she’s brought out the big guns; a rosary that had belonged to my grandfather -he’d actually carried it in his uniform pocket all through his service in World War II and credits it for bringing in home relatively safe and sound- that she’s brought all the way from Montreal and is currently clutching tightly across the room; mouth moving in silent prayer, the blood red beads wrapped around her hand as her thumb practically wears down the polish on the crucifix. It’s better than her knitting I suppose; she’d spent the past half an hour painstakingly working on a blue, yellow and green stripped baby blanket (one of two that she has planned) and the constant clicking of the plastic needles had nearly drove me insane. The noise had seemed deafening within the cramped confines of the private ‘quiet room’ down the hall from the operating suites; a nurse had shown us here on request by the doctor who’d worried about me being harassed for autographs while mixed in with the general public. You’d be surprised how many people will actually expect attention even at a time like this; I’d been stopped three times alone on the way back from filling out consent and insurance forms and I’d been called ‘prick’, ‘bastard’ and ‘asshole’ when I’d refused to sign the pieces of paper shoved in my face.

“Combien de temps est-il censé prendre?” my dad asks from where he sits on the opposite end of the tattered and faded blue vinyl couch that I’d parked my ass in the second I’d stepped into the room.

He’s always been the strong, silent type in these types of situations; he provides comfort through either popping out incredibly random yet unbelievable profound words of wisdom or by saying very little at all. Today he’s chosen the latter; eyes riveted on a wrinkled and ancient copy of Time magazine, one leg crossed over the other and his foot nervously bouncing up and down.

“Heure. Heure et une tête et demi,” I reply, and placing my elbows on my knees, run my hands over my weary, unshaven face. “As long as things go okay,” I add, as I entwine my fingers together and rest my chin on the top of my hands.

“I still don’t understand exactly what they’re doing,” he says. “I don’t understand how they can do surgery like this without having to open her right up. Back in the day they didn’t have all this fancy stuff. Now they can take someone’s damn appendix or gallbladder out without even cutting right into them.”

“They try to be as invasive as possible with every surgery these days,” my mom pipes up. “It’s the wonders of modern medicine.”

“I just don’t understand how they can do what they’re going to do without causing serious problems,” my father shrugs. “How they can take something out without anything happening to the babies.”

“Well that’s the downside to this kind of thing Serge,” my mother glares at him as if somehow one negative word or thought is going to cause the worst possible case scenario to happen. “Didn’t you hear your son the first ten times he explained this to you? That’s what they’re worried about happening. Causing harm to the babies is a serious risk. She could lose one, both…”

“…sometimes it can cause long term complications too,” I add. “Something could go wrong and she might not lose either of them but once they’re born the doctor will notice some problems. I don’t know why or how it would happen, but there could be birth defects, developmental problems that we’ll notice as they get older and start missing milestones and…”

“So you mean we could end up having retarded grandchildren,” he finishes for me. I know he doesn’t mean the word in a malicious, harmful; he was raised ‘old school’ where the ‘R word’ was perfectly acceptable and any and all children with ‘issues’ were sent to live in institutions the second they were born and their parents were told by professionals to simply ‘forget about them’.

“It’s developmentally disabled,” I correct. “No one uses that other word anymore, dad. Maybe the doctors as a strictly medical term. Kids aren’t retarded. They have special needs.”

“So what happens if one of your kids or both turns out re…developmentally disabled,” he quickly chooses the proper more politically correct term when my mother shoots him a deadly glare. “What are you going to do? Send them to a special place to live? Keep them in the house until they’re school age and then find somewhere where they’re with their own kind?”

“Serge!” my mother hisses. “This isn’t the forties or the fifties anymore! People don’t do that sort of thing! They keep their children at home and raise them on their own! Do you realize the kinds of resources that are out there for families now? The kind of therapies that the government provides? It isn’t like it used to be where children like that were locked away. It’s all about integration and treating them like valuable members of society. Do you realize how ignorant you sound?”

“He’s not ignorant mom,” I defend my old man despite the fact even I’m offended by his insinuation that I’d be ashamed of my own kid and send them away so I wouldn’t have to be bothered with them. “He’s just old school. His body aged past the forties and fifties but his brain didn’t.”

“I’m not saying all of this to be mean,” he speaks up. “I’m not an asshole. I’m just stating the facts and asking the hard questions, Lucie. I’ll love my grandkids regardless, but…”

“If anything like that happens to one or both of the babies, Em and I are going to raise them just like any other ‘normal’ kid,” I make air quotes around the second last word. “Families do it all the time. They have babies with issues and they love them as if there’s nothing wrong with them. If something happens, we’ll deal with it.”

“Je ne peux pas vous croire,” my mother spits from across the room, her eyes narrowed as she glares angrily at my father. “Vous êtes un âne. Je ne peux pas croire que tu dirais que ces choses”

He holds his hands up in both surrender and self defence and returns to his magazine.

“Gardez votre bouche fermée à partir de maintenant,” my mom growls, and then slips the rosary back into her purse and takes up her knitting once again. “I want to get these done as soon as possible,” she says, as the clicking of her needles once again fill the room. “Because if the babies are due in July we’ll obviously have to have a baby shower a couple of months before. It’s already March now so it doesn’t give me much time.”

“We wouldn’t be able to have one until at least the middle of June,” I point out. “Unless the team completely falls apart and we go on one hell of a losing streak, we’re going to make the playoffs. And if we go all the way it’ll be the first weekend of June before things are wrapped up completely. And twins are notoriously early.”

“Then we have a baby shower here in Pittsburgh before the babies are born and another one back in Montreal afterwards,” my mother reasons.

“Nobody needs to have two baby showers,” my father grumbles.

“There’s two babies isn’t there?” my mom challenges. “One for each.”

“And why do they need to have a shower in the first place?” he inquires. “You do realize that your son isn’t exactly poor, right?”

“Everyone deserves a baby shower regardless of how wealthy they are,” my mother informs him. “And if you think for one second I’m not having a shower for my grandsons…”

“Can you two not do this?” I shove my hands through my hair and yank on the short strands. Growing up I‘d never once doubted my parents‘ unwavering devotion to each other; my father worships the ground my mother walks on and would give her the sun and the moon and the stars if he could and my mom adores the often grumpy old bastard to the ends of the earth. But their bantering and bickering is epic. “Can you two not do this whole Desi and Lucy back and forth thing? Could you maybe save it until you’re back at the house and I don’t have to hear it? Because honestly? My nerves can’t take it.”

“You need to have a stiff drink,” my dad observes, as he eyes my jittery legs. “Is there a bar around here? Across the street maybe? We could make a quick run and…”

“I don’t need a drink,” I interject. “That’s the last thing I need. I just need…” I sigh heavily and run my hands over my face once more. “…I just need the two of you to stop yapping at each other and for this operation to be over. Do you think you two could do that? Play the quiet game for a few minutes?”

My father nods in agreement; my mother doesn’t say a word as she turns her attention back to her knitting. It’s heaven on earth for a couple of minutes; the only sounds in the room are the continuous clicking of my mom’s plastic needles and my dad flipping pages in his magazine. Time is moving agonizingly slow; I can’t stop glancing down at my watch and muttering profanities when not even a minute has passed since the last time I checked. I’ve been trying to remain positive; I’ve been trying to surround my boys and my wife with nothing but good thoughts and I’ve been allowing myself to think beyond the operating room and what’s going on inside of it and instead focusing on the remaining months of the pregnancy. On watching Emma-Leigh grow bigger and bigger as our babies thrive inside of her and being able to feel them kick and squirm. And most of all, I try to think about what it’s going to be like when they’re finally here; when those nurses put my sons in my arms for the very first time and all of the stress from the previous months finally dissipates once and for all.

“You know what the old saying is Maxime,” my mother’s tone is scolding as she catches me looking down at my watch yet again. “Un pot garde à ne jamais bouillir.”

“Just seems like it’s taking forever,” I mutter, and press the heels of my palms into my weary eyes before laying my elbows on my knees once more and proceeding to fiddle with the wedding band on my left hand; my thumb and middle finger on my left hand repeatedly pulling the ring up to my knuckle and sliding it back down again.

“What’s taking Peyton so long?” my father inquires. “She went to get coffee twenty minutes ago. Where did she have to go? Columbia? To get the beans?”

“MaGee is a pretty big place,” I remind him, referring to the official name for the women’s hospital that makes up one of the separate parts of UPMC. “Lots of patients here means lots of staff and lots of visitors.”

“Your grandmother wanted to know why Emma-Leigh’s having the operation here,” my mom says.

“Because it’s a women’s hospital. This is where all her appointments are. Her OB, all her ultrasounds, where the babies will be born…”

“She wanted to know why the two of you didn’t go to a Catholic hospital,” my mother continues. “I tried telling her that in this day and age there’s no longer separate hospitals for certain denominations and that people are treated everywhere these days regardless of religious affiliation. But you know your grandmother…”

“This is the best place for Em and the babies to be so this is where we come,” I conclude.

“And she’s still worried about whether or not you’re going to baptize them Catholic,” she adds. “She seems to think that it’s going to be frowned upon because the babies were conceived out of wedlock and…”

“Well I hate to break grandma’s heart, but I’ve been doing a lot of things out of wedlock since I was fifteen. You need to tell her to just relax. Em and I will do what’s right for the babies, okay? They’ll be born here and we’ll baptize them when we’re good and ready and we’ll eventually send them to Catholic school. For now she needs to just take it easy and let us get through the next twenty weeks first. Hell, the next two hours for that matter.”

“Still say you need a stiff drink,” my dad mutters. “You don’t have anything wrong with you that a good sit down with Jack Daniels won’t fix.”

“I don’t need a stiff drink,” I argue. “What I need is for the next hour to just fly by. That’s what I need. So unless either of you have magical powers that can speed up time, I’d rather you just…”

*******

The sound of the door clicking open brings my sentence to an abrupt halt and my heart immediately leaps into my throat and my stomach painfully constricts. All I can think is horrible thoughts; a nurse or a doctor coming to tell me that something terrible has happened and that we’ve lost the babies. Or worse, I’ve lost my entire family -and my sole purpose for living- all in the blink of an eye.

“Look who I managed to find wandering the halls,” Peyton chirps, as she holds the door open with her hip and allows a grinning Bruno Gervais -both hands loaded down with beverage take out trays- to step into the room. He’s the last person I’d been expecting to come wandering in; I’d called him the night before to tell him about his ‘nephews’ and he’d just gotten into Ottawa for the start of the Islanders’ recent road trip.

“You need a map to find your way around this place,” he declares, and then passes off the carry trays to Peyton as my mom bounds out of her chair and hurries across the room to greet him with a hug and kisses to both cheeks.

“You have to see my grandsons!” she cries, and scurries for the chair next to the one she’d vacated in order to snag the pictures she keeps tucked in her purse. “Maxime Junior and Mathieu,” she gushes, and proudly shoves the photos into my best friend’s hands.

“We call them the M and M’s,” Peyton reveals, as she sets the drinks down on the table in the middle of the room and affectionately tousles my hair before I get to my feet.

“Now I know they’re not that far along, but I can honestly say that judging by these pictures?” Bruno nods down at the images in his hands. “Thank God they look like their mother. ‘Cause if they had have looked like their old man…I don’t know…what a horrible fate. And what’s going on around here anyway? Flower’s girl is having triplets, Tanger puts a bun in Princess’ oven and then Mad Max goes and kills two birds with one stone. What’s up with all the French guys not knowing what birth control is? Or is it just something funky in the water at the Mellon? What’s up daddy Max?” he reaches out and draws me into a tight hug; the hand on the back of my head and the forearm across the small of my back holding me place. “You’re holding up okay?”

“Nervous,” I admit. “Scared shitless, actually.”

“Things’ll be okay,” he assures me, and then pats me on the back of the head before releasing me. “You honestly thought I wouldn’t show up?” he asks, as he lightly slaps my cheek. “You really thought I’d make you go through this alone?”

“I just figured ‘cause you were on a road trip…”

“There’s more important things in life than hockey,” he says. “Way more important things. You haven’t heard any news?”

I shake my head.

“Well what’s the saying? No news is good news? You did a good thing here daddy Max,” he nods down at the pictures once again. “Didn’t think you had it in you to do that thorough of a job. I kinda feel bad for Emma-Leigh though. Only girl in a houseful of Talbots? She’ll never survive.”

“Oh I think she’ll be just fine,” Peyton muses, and then winks at me. “Just means she’ll have three men that worship the ground she walks on. Two sons she can whip into shape just like she did with their dad.”

“I notice he doesn’t argue that fact,” Bruno teases me. “I notice he doesn’t insist that he’s not whipped. You did a good job, mon ami. Got yourself a nice little family here. Make sure you treat them right, okay? I don’t want to have to come down to Pittsburgh and beat some sense into you if you screw things up.”

“Not a chance,” I assure him.

“Max has been a good boy,” my wife’s best friend says. “Exceptionally good. Don’t worry, Bruno. He’s got a lot of people here keeping an eye on him.”

“Good,” he says with a nod of approval. “’Cause I don’t want to have to…”

His sentence is cut off by the door swinging open yet again.

“Mister Talbot?” Doctor Abrams breezes in with a reassuring, confident smile plastered on her face; still clad in her surgical scrubs with her mask dangling around her neck and protective booties on her feet. “I just wanted to come in and tell you that everything went extremely well. We successfully removed the cyst and sewed up her cervix and we’ve moved her down to recovery room.”

“And the babies?” Peyton’s on her feet and clutching my hand tightly. “What about the babies?”

“We did an ultrasound and the boys are fine,” the doctor replies. “There’s lots of movement and their heart rates are strong. And now they’ve got a lot of wiggle room and tons of space to grow. We’ll keep mom in for a few more days just to make sure there’s no complications from the surgery. We’ll watch for bleeding or cramping or we’ll keep an eye on her blood pressure. So far things look very promising. It’s the most stable her vitals have been since she was admitted. I can take you down to recovery if you’d like to see her. We’ll be moving her back to her room once she’s a little more lucid.”

“Go on…” Peyton rubs my back softly as my teary eyed mother grabs my face in both hands and kisses each of my cheeks. “Go and see your family, Max. It’s over now. All the scary stuff is over. You can enjoy those babies now.”

“Congratulations dad, ” Doctor Abrams offers me a hand. “I can officially tell you that it’s time to enjoy the next twenty weeks. Would you like me to take you down? I’m sure you’re just dying to see your family. After everything that you’ve all been through…”

“I’d like to see them,” I confirm, and my old man -struggling with his own tears- draws me into a tight hug before I get a chance to leave the room.

For the first time since that pregnancy test came back positive, all of the stress and worry finally disappear.

And I actually finally allow myself to feel like a daddy.