Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt Page A

laughing as they come into the room from their small excursion to a Queen Street café for the Blue Mountain coffee that Sasha says is the best in town. I click the clasps of the briefcase back in place and leave it propped up against the wall. I join them by the bed. Fred has returned to his hospital to check in on an elderly patient he was assigned yesterday, and somehow I’m relieved that all I have to deal with in this room are these three women.
    “Shit!” Charlotte says as she takes in Anna’s bald head.
    “You’re head’s a perfect shape, Mom,” says Sasha.
    “Braised harps strung in trees—”
    “Mom,” Sasha interrupts her mother gently, “I bought you some nail polish. Charlotte and I are going to do your nails. We have time. I really never have seen such a perfect shape. I wonder if mine would look like that if I shaved it.”
    “Do you remember, Mom, we did this when I had my tonsils out,” Charlotte says, taking on her sister’s gentleness as she pulls out the polish and some cotton balls.
    For six months after it ended, I ached for her—for her, and for the roaring sound that had rushed through me. But slowly I got the knack of this deadpan muttering
.
    I wonder if Fred has really had to return to work or if he’s off fucking the woman he’s obviously been seeing. And what if I were to tell everything to Anna now, before she leaves this room for the surgery? Tell her how I never knew that defiance and betrayal would feel so fucking great?

    I will the girls to leave. I pretend to be packing up myself by going to my briefcase and opening it.
    “Charlotte has been flirting with the male nurse,” Sasha says to Anna in a playful voice.
    “I have not!”
    “You think because he does something un-macho that he’ll be great in bed—I know you.”
    “Sash!”
    “That’s what you thought about Robert.”
    “Robert was good in bed!”
    They laugh. I take paper out of the briefcase, then the drawing I did last night. I hesitate, then snap shut the briefcase with my free hand.
    “In the desert there was one street light near our hut at the oasis. The Bedouin who danced with me had three wives.”
    I turn and look up at Anna’s face, her head, round and then tapered towards her neck like a light bulb. I know that what she has just said is not confabulation. This really happened. I was there.
    “She asked him if he minded night shifts,” Sasha says.
    “That’s not flirting,” Charlotte defends.
    “Ha!”
    “His hips—they tossed themselves at me like a woman’s,” Anna says, and the girls don’t exactly ignore her but neither do they take what she’s saying seriously. Only I know that Anna is right. The man moved like a belly dancer.
    Before everything changed.
    Cairo had been a layover between the Upper Nile—Mustafa and the Valley of the Kings—and the next leg of our holiday in the desert. We were picked up at our hotel by a driver and another man I thought was to be our translator, but upon attempting to communicate with them it was clear that neither could speak English. The extra passenger, I realized, was the driver’s friend along for the ride. He took advantage of the minivan’s sound system to play tapes of Arabic music at high volume for the entire five-hour trip. As we drove past various formations of desert sand and rock, fantastical mushrooms, giant drums, and hundreds of dunes that resembled the backs of house-sized beetles skittering along the brown sand, I felt drugged, kidnapped, by the men and the chantlike singing blaring from the speakers.
    We arrived in one of the towns of the Bahariya Oasis in the western desert of Egypt. I stumbled out of the van, fatigued and disoriented, and we were led to the home of a Bedouin family whose eldest son, Helal, was known, theCairo concierge had told us, for eventful tours into the White and Western Deserts, and whom we would meet at dinner that evening.
    “This is wonderful,” Anna said. She pressed her body close to mine