He cried in his bed. Afraid of the dark, Plato would not leave his room even though she had plugged in night lights by his book shelf and in the hallway socket. Because she could only sleep in absolute darkness, Emily always shut her door to prevent the dull amber glow from slipping under her eyelids. The cry at first sounded like a distant bird in a dream, for when sleep finally relieved her from discomfort and pain, lately she dreamed about birds of varying sizes and species crashing into and splintering against skyscraper windows, splotching the glass with blood and gizzards. The cry became more regular and insistent like a sustained howl. Years ago she had been able to leap out of bed and rush to the aid of her younger brother and sister, but that had indeed been years ago and both were now dead, buried in the family plot next to her parents.

Her glasses lay somewhere on her night table by a stack of books. Reaching for them, her head heavy with fragments of sleep and bird bones, she knocked over the glass of water she always placed under the lamp. Her body weary, her limbs aching, her mind fluttered by suicidal birds, their screeches intermingled with Plato’s cry, Emily hoisted the top half of her reluctant body, pushing aside the duvet.

“Mama! Mama!”

“I’m coming, darling,” although she realized she had whispered. Plato couldn’t possibly have heard. Her legs resisted wakening and strained against her effort to pull them off the mattress and find the floor. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, she paused. A bare foot rested on a puddle of water. Give her a moment, please, to gather her strength and wits.

“Mama!”

For the first two years of his life Emily had kept Plato’s crib in her room and the excitement of having a child — at her age! — had rejuvenated her bones and she sprang up as lightly as a young girl, so she tried to convince her remaining friends. The infant’s erratic sleep pattern quickly depleted youthful vigour. She had thought about hiring a night nurse to help out, but money was lacking, especially after she paid all the fertility clinic’s and doctors’ bills, which had been considerable. Canada ’s health insurance did not cover the cost of fertilizing the eggs of old women. It was not regarded as a medically or personally necessary procedure for anyone over the age of fifty-five.

Frequent flights and protracted residence in Rome near the clinic did not come cheap. She had lived in a pensione not far from the room overlooking the Piazza di Spagna where Keats had died. She had visited the poet’s quarters, touched his death bed and was moved by his death mask, but had little time or resources to sight see because the passion for a pregnancy had devastated her savings. Not to mention all the follow-up care. Advised against letting the child sleep in her room since he was getting too old for that, she bought a real bed designed for toddlers. The expense of outfitting Plato’s room had been great. No one had quite prepared her for the price of parenting, and all her friends had long ago given away their children’s furniture, toys and clothes.

Donations had poured in up to a point when Plato was born. Newspaper and You Tube pictures displayed the proud 70 year-old mother in a blue shapeless hospital gown tied around her wattled neck, smiling a deeply-wrinkled face over her swaddled new-born child. She had also worn a blue bandana to hold back her long silver-grey hair. Within a year, public interest had been diverted by yet another old woman giving birth somewhere in Romania, then the tsunami, and all those tragedies in Africa , every thing claimed the attention of charity.

“Mama, mama!”

“Okay, darling, mama’s coming.” Her voice sounded distant as if she were calling from a grave. She could not compete even after appearing on television, and now she no longer held the world record, which of course had never been her intention. Before she died, let her conceive, endure the travails and ecstasy of childbirth like any ordinary woman. Modern technology had come to her aid, true, with an expensive price tag which she sometimes mentioned in the television talk shows and interviews. Why was it okay for old men to be fathers, but not old women to be mothers? Men didn’t require technological assistance or have to pay thousands of dollars.

“Who’s that writer?” she had asked, “the old, really old writer who died not too long ago? Sure, he married a woman capable of bearing a child, but he was old enough to be a great grandfather. He didn’t need science to pump him full of sperm, did he? Look at all the old actors with their pretty new wives and babies. Why should an old woman be deprived of the right to be pregnant when an old man doesn’t have to ask anyone’s permission as long as he can get it up?”

The audience had hooted and clapped, although a few women stood up during question period and denounced Emily as if she had pissed in a pail on stage. One woman had used the words natural and unnatural so many times in her three-minute harangue that Emily wanted to hurl the water jug or leap off the stage like a superannuated panther and claw the skin off the woman’s botox-injected face, except mature mothers didn’t act that way. Technology came to everyone’s aid to improve their life sooner or later, why not help a woman conceive beyond menopause? She had asked the question rhetorically and a rather large number of people wanted to give her prolonged and specific answers based upon a plethora of biases, prejudices and religious rules and regulations.

Lord knows, she had never asked any religion for permission to do anything. She had tried to live a natural life, ate no meat and renounced smoking. In her early twenties, she had miscarried, then put aside the idea of having children, married late to a man twenty years older than she, lost her husband, distracted her maternal instincts and biological clock by working long hours at several jobs to save money and pay off her mortgage because Roland had died in debt without adequate insurance coverage. He had undergone a heart transplant at sixty. No one had called it unnatural. Finally, mortgage paid off, sufficient capital saved through clever investments and bonds, working longer than most people to increase her cash, bolstered and encouraged by newspaper reports of elderly women giving birth, she retired and flew to Italy . It was her right to have a child, for which she had paid dearly. Her friends preoccupied with their grandchildren, travels and other activities, provided little real assistance.

“Mama!”

How demanding a five year old boy could be. The instruction manuals were a bit convoluted on the question of when he should stop wetting the bed, offering contradictory advice and theories. Her neighbour’s child Ben did not wet the bed. Ben’s parents had moved into the house next door a year ago. When Emily was pushing Plato in his backyard swing, Estelle, Ben’s mother, had cheerily called over the chain-link fence, “Hi, I’m Estelle. We moved in last week. My little boy is three and he’d love to play with your little grandson. Do you think his mother would mind if my son came over?”

At last she found her way to Plato’s bedroom where he sat squelched in the middle of his blankets crying like a forlorn elf, holding his arms out to his mother. How could she resist? Not even the smell of piss or the annoyance of having to change sheets at three in the morning could defeat the unearthly love she felt for the child, her beloved, dearly begotten son.

“It’s okay, Plato, darling, just an accident. Mama will carry you to her bed and you can sleep there. I’ll leave the door open for the light. Will you like that? There’s nothing to be afraid of sweetheart. Mama’s here.”

Sniffling, he nodded yes and, her back straining to pick him up, went heavy and limp in her arms. He seemed to fall instantly asleep against her shoulder as Emily’s legs wobbled down the corridor. With slow difficulty she leaned over her mattress and lay the boy down, covered him, rubbed her backside, then remembered the knocked-over glass. She had stepped in the water again. If she switched on the lamp, that might be too much light and would waken Plato. The immediate problem was his wet bed, so she returned to the room and stripped off its piss smelling sheets, dragged them to her room and spread them over the floor to absorb the water after she crawled next to her son and tried to fall asleep again.

She had not really enjoyed a perfect, uninterrupted night’s sleep since bringing her son home. Now the side effects of her treatments allowed her to sleep fitfully at best. At first help had been immediate, both volunteer and paid for. A dear friend, however, could only take three nights of it before she excused herself. What Emily did not hear from the crib, she imagined. Even the newly-hired night nurse fell asleep occasionally. What had she been paying for? Emily dismissed her and regretted her action after five nights of broken sleep.

A new mother couldn’t sleep when Infant Death Syndrome hovered over her baby like the uninvited and maleficent fairy in Sleeping Beauty? Then Plato woke up, it seemed, every two hours with a screech. Now, she knew it was only a matter of time before incapacitation set in like a wintry deep freeze and she’d be unable to move. Friends advised private duty nursing, but the cost for regular attendance was prohibitive. She had invested so much money to protect her son’s future that little remained to ease the burden of her own present.

Malea, her Filipino assistant, helped five mornings a week and babysat two afternoons and one evening so Emily could get out of the house, buy groceries, have her hair done at the beauty parlour, or join her friends for afternoon tea or a movie. This morning she had phoned in sick, just as Emily finished dressing, something she always tried to do before the baby awoke. It was good policy to gird one’s loins and to greet the day and child fully clothed. No, she had insisted to her friends, she had not given birth at this late age to park her baby in a day care centre, but Malea did provide relief and, given her doctor’s appointments, a measure of assurance that her boy would be properly looked after during her absence.

Changed, fed, and now watching a Sesame Street episode to keep him quiet, Plato had awakened just before five and his ear-splitting screeches indicated he preferred not to return to his bed. Before his birth, she usually enjoyed a slow breakfast of coffee, orange juice, a boiled egg on an English muffin, and read the morning paper. After the birth, half her coffee went grey and cold. Who had time for the newspaper when a five year old clung to her legs or wanted to play racing cars in the corridor? She relied upon the wall for support when she slid down to the floor on to her ass, spreading her legs, and had to arrange herself on all fours to get up again. Now she experienced great pain when she lowered her body to play.

“Don’t rush so fast, darling. Mama can’t keep up with you.”

She had allowed him to bike to the park with the promise that he cycle just ahead of her on the sidewalk and not disappear around a corner. Then he did just that. Sped up, turned, and disappeared.

Plato! Dropping her satchel, she began to run insofar as she could, calling the child’s name. Anything could happen. He could lose control and swerve into the street in front of a car. He could run into a pedestrian. He could be snatched by a pedophile while she huffed and fought against pain hissing in her stomach. Her lungs gasped and sweat dampened her blouse. It was foolish to have let him take the bike, but he so loved his thick-wheel, electric blue bike with the banners and training wheels, a gift last month for his fifth-birthday. How could she deny the great love of her life?

“Plato! Plato!”

Then, at first like a mirage through her tears, then a real life mischievous boy squealing delight – “I’m Captain Bike Boy!” he appeared.

“How many times have I told you not to rush ahead of me,” but she was so winded it sounded like loving praise spoken in a whisper.

In the park, Plato squat in the sand pile with his blue pail and red shovel, part of the horde of thick plastic garishly coloured toys that crowded her once very neatly appointed condo. She sat with her hands folded on her lap, wincing, but determined that today she would let the boy enjoy himself in the park for as long as he pleased. A girl, dressed in pink shorts and white T-shirt with Tinkerbelle glittering on the front and back – not something Emily would have put on a child for sand play, joined her boy with her own plastic shovel and pail and the two seemed to get along well enough. Inside her insulated satchel, there were enough juice boxes, egg-salad sandwiches, Ben’s favourite, and bananas to share with another child. They would make a picnic somewhere out of the intense sun light. Fortunately she had forgotten neither straw hat nor sun glasses for few trees shaded the park.

“Try not throw the sand around, darling, the wind will blow it in the little girl’s eyes.”

“What’s the boy’s name? He’s sweet.”

The girl’s mother sat on the bench, waved to her daughter, and assumed that Emily would care to chat. Despite the fierceness of the sun bleaching the sky and grounds, she did not wear sunglasses under her rhinestone studded, purple and pink baseball cap.

“Plato,” and Emily noted that surprise raised and arched the woman’s eyebrows, plucked to near-triangular perfection, as the inevitable response came blurting out between the plastic whiteness of her teeth.

“Plato?”

“After the philosopher.”

“Ah, I see. My little girl is Tessa, well, Theresa, but we call her Tessa.”

Emily gasped as pain streaked across her stomach like a viper, but she did not think the woman noticed.

“After the saint,” Emily said.

“Saint? Oh yes, of course, but no, after his grandmother. There she is, the lady under the one or two blessed trees in this park, next to the baby carriage. She’s holding my other child, a boy, Andrew, Andy we call him for short.”

Emily could see from this distance that Theresa’s grandmother was probably a decade younger than she. Rather than sit and watch, the woman held baby Andy in her arms and walked around the carriage, sometimes hoisting the child above her head. Plato’s grandparents were buried in a cemetery in North Toronto . He had never spoken the words grandma or grandpa. Her late husband’s parents were also dead. It seemed that all her relatives were dead, a fact that had ceased to cause any grief for she had long ago accustomed herself to the inevitable, closer than she would have liked. Protest, however, remained futile. That is what happened to the elderly. They died. And the young in the natural course of things did not. That was how it was supposed to be.

The pain coiled in her abdomen and Emily bent over with a gasp.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, just a little cramp. I ate something which did not agree with me. I’m fine, thank you..”

The wind picked up and swirled the sand when Plato poured it out of his pail. A cloudbank approached from the northwest, darkening as it sped towards them, threatening sudden showers. She had failed to check the weather forecast. Suddenly her flesh prickled to a precipitous drop in temperature.

“I think it looks like rain. How changeable the weather these days. Tessa, sweetie, gather your things. Well, it’s been nice meeting you. Perhaps I’ll see you and Plato again some time. We come to the park a couple of times a week. Tessa, let’s go, sweetie.”

Quickly Emily glanced at the roundedness of the woman’s breasts held up in a red halter tied behind the neck. Almost too perfect although Emily didn’t know what constituted perfection outside of magazine pictures, but suspected either implants or other cosmetic surgery. Her own breasts sagged to her waist if she let them, elongated, brown-spotted, hardly a silky, creamy white like Tessa’s mother’s, if cleavage was anything to go by. Dugs, she remembered from Shakespeare, an archaic term no longer in use, dugs that Plato child had never suckled.

The cloud darkened and billowed. She tried to stand up, but that venomous viper again struck and forced her down. Perhaps it would not rain after all and she had some minutes yet to recover. Taking off her sunglasses, Emily blinked against the sun’s glare intensifying under the cloudbank which reared high and spread out like a widening horde rumbling above her head. She followed the flight of crows seeking shelter in the soft darkness of the catalpa tree. She thought she had called her child’s name, Plato, Plato. At once the fierce sun vanished behind tumultuous cloud. The wind suddenly turning cool, Emily shivered on the park bench.