Vital Signs Read Online Free

his empire. “Pa paaaaa!” he said, mimicking the computer game’s sounds, “the greatest feeling.”
    Anna pushes her chair back from the table and crosses her arms. She smiles, knowing we are watching her, and says, “Eat up, then,” and I wonder what she means by “eat” and what she means by “then,” and if she really is saying “Fuck off, now.” I watch her cross her legs and begin to shake her foot up and down, and then in little sideways movements, then sideways and circling. It’s something she does—a nervous tic. Five years into our marriage that foot became irksome; the shaking felt like the rattlings ofa mad woman. It contained within it all that Anna never said to me, even though she claimed to talk about her feelings so easily and had asked me to talk about mine. How I despised that foot and its compulsive, constant motion.
    You hit me, there in the street, because I didn’t know why women always had so many questions I had to answer
.
    As I stare at the pale heel that gapes from the sole of her sandal, I notice a callus, scaly and hard like a boat-hull barnacle, protruding from her big toe. I consider kneeling to lick it moist and soft, beg it to whisper my name and recount to me the days after the Bloor cinema, to give it all a date, a title, a proper heading in Anna’s life accounting.
    “Mom, we need to know what you want to do about all of this.” As usual, Charlotte cuts through to what everyone else cannot express.
    “Charlie,” Sasha says, “I think she’s just told us.” What has Sasha understood from Anna that the rest of us have failed to grasp? How does she know?
    “Look, I’m sorry everyone, to be like this again, but get real. If we don’t do something there’s a chance her brain will burst open like a water balloon. You want to watch that?” Charlotte says.
    Anna’s foot stops circling the air. My lips part, but I only lick them and stay quiet.
    “Charlotte,” Fred says, “You’re a complete bitch.”
    “Fred!” I shout, and for the first time in years I am the disciplining father again.
    “Mom, I want to play you the music from the show at Toronto Dance, and, oh, I have some photos. We start rehearsals soon, so I’m quitting this run of
Dirty.”
Sasha announces a significant event in her life—and changes the subject—with an insouciance that neither of her siblings would ever be able to manage.
    As Sasha stands up, her ribcage moves like a purl stitch that Anna once showed me as she was knitting a sweater for Fred. I gasp, and I see that the others have also traced the perfect, fluid line. Fred has taken hold of his left wrist. Anna reaches for Sasha’s hand, and I realize that it’s been a long time—two, maybe three years—since my wife has worn her wedding ring. Why do I only now consider the significance of that?
    I didn’t know the blondeness would make me want it again and again. I thought it would be just once
.
    “Dad, let’s go outside. We need to talk,” Fred says and I nod.
    Charlotte looks at me as though this is all my fault. “Fred, in a second. First,” she says, intercepting us and pointing with her chin in the direction of the kitchen, indicating to her brother that she’d like a private word with him. She looks at me with scorn.
    “Dad, give me two secs. I’ll meet you on the porch,” my son says, accommodating us both. The two of them get up to conspire, and I push my chair back and head outside.
    After our first date, and the foreign film that I will never be able to remember, I lost all capacity for sleep. I wouldwork long days at DesignAge’s trendy office on Queen Street West. I was prolific, and my design for a large optical chain, with an outline of spectacles buried in the firm’s name, became my first major coup. Suddenly I felt like a man who could not fail at anything. For the entire eighteen months before we were married, I was high on my own brilliance. Anna’s presence in my life seemed to confirm it, and