The Matter of Sylvie (12 page)

Jacqueline pulls the plug and waits for Sylvie, who rolls stomach-down in their sea-green tub, following the mini cyclone of water as it twirls down the drain. Headed for the ocean, every last drop of it, Jacqueline tells her. When the cyclone is gone, Sylvie allows her mother to lift her, towel her off, pull on cotton underwear, cotton T-shirt, and carry her down the hall to her room. Jacqueline lays Sylvie on her metal-framed bed without turning on the light so as not to disrupt her sleepiness. Jacqueline sits in the dark, patting Sylvie's back, a nightly ritual. She sees a flash of lightning outside Sylvie's window, hears the sharp rupture of thunder not a second later. Goosebumps undulate along the surface of her freckled skin.

On the heels of younger, faster Constable Pete, Corporal Lloyd rounds the corner behind Neville's hotel. They wait while the inspector gets into his car, drives slowly, the odd townsperson on the street, otherwise not much else moving in this kind of weather. The snow has stopped, the sky low, socked-in, Frigidaire white. The north wind picking up so that Lloyd feels it penetrate his undershirt like pinpricks, tiny arrows of ice on his vulnerable skin. He left his parka in Neville's lounge. Damn stupid. He can't go back in case the inspector's not alone, nor can he risk the inspector finding him on the street—a simple Breathalyzer will do him in. The cold makes his thoughts thick, slow. Likely the inspector's in town for the night; he'll be staking out the detachment, waiting for Lloyd or Constable Pete to show up.

He looks at his watch, 1:15. It's only a matter of time before the vet's feline op wanders in for their 2:00 AM appointment and likewise the veterinarian wanders next door to the detachment looking for him. He's got to get Jimmy out of there. He won't send Constable Pete; he doesn't want Pete mixed up in his mess.

“Got your car today?” Lloyd asks Pete, who is standing with his back up against Neville's building out of the blasting cold wind.

“The wife has it. She's going to Warspite this afternoon for something or other.” Constable Pete checks his watch. “She should still be home, want me to call?”

“That would be dandy, Pete.”

Constable Pete goes the long way round to Neville's café while Lloyd watches the inspector drive across the street to the courthouse. He gets out and peers into the frosted windows of Lloyd's cruiser. The frost bodes well, Corporal Lloyd knows. Gives him the excuse of elongated business inside. The inspector goes into the courthouse. Lloyd can see him at the front desk, Doris Michelchuk's chocolate soufflé hair tilting this way and that. He's glad he called her a prize earlier, can only hope she misplaces her razor-sharp Rota memory on his whereabouts.

The inspector comes out. He glances back at Doris, who's standing at the courthouse window with her hands on her generous hips pointing down Main Street, her head nodding in the direction of the hardware store. Irritation etched on the inspector's face, he gets into his car and drives the opposite direction.

Corporal Lloyd smiles. He owes Doris one.

Constable Pete comes back, confirms that the car, his wife are accounted for. He's got Lloyd's parka and one leather glove.

“Who's on late shift?” Lloyd pulls the still-warm parka on, zips it up beneath his chin. No longer the cardamom smell of babies but the dank, fusty compulsion of Neville's lounge. He puts on the one glove, stuffs his other hand in his pocket.

“Boykos and Sasyniuk,” says Constable Pete.

“Good, they can manage on their own.”

Lloyd hands him the keys to the cruiser.

“Run me over to your car, then go out and visit the Fleck brothers. Tell them I need them at the detachment tomorrow morning, 9:00 AM sharp.”

He knows the Fleck brothers won't show up. He hasn't got any real hard evidence against them beyond Jimmy Widman's word—there's not a shadow of doubt in Lloyd's mind where Jimmy is concerned, but he's seasoned enough to know Fleck democracy will rule in this case. He simply wants the Fleck boys to enjoy a sleepless night on his behalf.

“Will do,” says Pete. “After that?”

“Stay home with your wife, it's too cold to go to Warspite today.” He winks at Constable Pete, who flushes red.

Constable Pete jogs easily across the street to the courthouse, climbs into the cruiser, and starts it. Doris Michelchuk watches from the window. Constable Pete drives down the alley behind Neville's hotel. She waves at the two of them as they pull onto Main Street, then turn right down a back alley.

When she's sure the coyote is dead, Lesa goes over, lays the Grim Reaper's cape across the animal's stock-still warm body, her own body cold, in shock. She shivers in the October trench, then lies down beside the coyote, as close as she dares to the infested animal. She can see fleas jumping ship as the host's body cools. She doesn't care. She runs her fingers along the bridge of the coyote's snout, the soft fur like velveteen, like the smooth skin on the inside of her mother's freckled arms. She feels the animal's heat extinguish completely, can no longer see its vaporous soul, imagined or otherwise. After a while she sits up, wipes her face with her numb hands, dusts the grey highway grit off her black Spandex, then claws her way back up the embankment to her mother's waiting car.

Mercifully the cigarette butt in the back seat has extinguished, but not before burning a perfectly symmetrical circle in the velour of her mother's car. Lesa glances once more at the lifeless coyote in the highway ditch. An image she'll conjure up days, nights, years from now, along with the image of her mother in her father's car, for the futile purpose of self-torment. Nothing she can change, but like certain troubling luggage it's perpetually transportable.

Lesa digs through her red suitcase, finds her blue jeans, white tennis shoes, her Moroccan sweater. She unzips her pleather boots, slides the jeans over her Spandex, pulls on the thick sweater, glad for the double layers, the warmth. Then she takes her boots, props them up against a mileage sign on the side of Highway 2, and plants the stiletto heels into the soft gravel in the off chance that the waitress from Carstairs might drive by and claim them. Someone needs to have a good/God Wednesday. She starts her mother's car and drives the rest of the way to Red Deer in the dead quiet.

After patting Sylvie's back for a full three-quarters of an hour until her dark eyes finally gave in, cried uncle, closed, Jacqueline clicks the door shut ever so quietly and goes to retrieve Nate from the living room chesterfield. She carries Nate down the hall and lays him in the twin bed across from Lesa. She pulls the Fantastic Four sheet over Nate, glances across at Lesa, who, asleep, on top of her covers, is still fully dressed in her skort and blouse from this morning. Why didn't Lesa put her pyjamas on? Likely she didn't brush her teeth either after her makeshift dinner. Jacqueline examines the sprinkle of umber freckles across Lesa's nose like her own, a resolve to her jaw even in sleep. Jacqueline feels bad about the Wonder Bread and peanut butter. She didn't even have time to give Lesa a proper supper. What with young Nate and the mess on the living room carpet and the matter of Sylvie. A relentless constant in her life that she can't put out of her mind for a brief moment; even in her dreams Sylvie haunts her. Jacqueline knows Lesa gets the short straw. But she's tired, so full, it seems, of metal burrs these days.

Jacqueline sits down on the bed and soothes her palm over Lesa's lightly sunburnt cheeks, her smooth forehead. She shouldn't expect so much from her. She's five years old, a child. Though Lesa seems to have something that Sylvie responds to, a calming effect, a silent bond, an unconscious way of communicating like twins, perhaps it's their closeness in age. Jacqueline knows how heavily she relies on Lesa. It's not fair, but she doesn't know what else to do. She can't rely on her husband, and her mother, two provinces away, is of little use. She thought about calling her mother this afternoon, but the last conversation she had with her mother, her mother said, “You make your bed at dawn and every dusk you lie in.” A twist Jacqueline hadn't heard before and wasn't quite sure what her mother meant by it either. Nothing good, she's sure. No, she doesn't need that right now. Her mother-in-law is even less useful; the sun rises but never sets on her only son.

Lesa stirs and rolls over. Jacqueline puts her hand on Lesa's back, considers gently waking her and then the two of them can go into the kitchen and share a midnight snack. She feels the day slipping from her tense shoulders. They are two women in this together, she thinks, not just now but for life. Such is the nature of women, be it fate or blight of genetics, she doesn't know which. They are the caregivers, the nurturers. She pushes Lesa's strawberry-blond bangs off her forehead. Exhales into the dark, would like to simply lie down beside Lesa and go to sleep too. But she knows she needs to eat something both for herself and the growing fetus in her uterus. She can't think of it as a baby, not yet, not with the possibility that it could be another Sylvie.

She tucks Nate's peach towel lightly over Lesa for when the rain comes and cools everything down. She forgives her utterly, completely.

On Lloyd's covert operation to the veterinarian's next to his RCMP detachment, he manages to move Jimmy Widman sight unseen into Constable Pete's post-pubescent, orange fluorescent '73 Camaro, a Z28 that has thick black racing stripes up the hood and down the back of the car. Hardly the unobtrusive getaway car Lloyd wanted, but a car nonetheless. Likely the inspector is still wandering the town in search of him, but Lloyd's not immediately worried. He's got friends in many places. He fishes through his breast pocket and finds a leftover El Producto from earlier this morning, so long ago it seems like days have passed, but still it's Wednesday. He pushes the lighter in, waits for the quiet metal click in between Jimmy's sporadic mouth breathing from the back seat that sounds like a spouting whale, a regular Moby Dick. He lights his cigar.

As he skirts along the unpaved lane in front of his detachment, he checks to see if Jacqueline's at the kitchen window, smoking, doing the dishes, gazing blankly at the prairie outside. An endless flat earth void covered in white then wheat then white then wheat, year in year out, relentless in its unvarying cycle. What Jacqueline searches for, Lloyd doesn't know. Not him, he knows, she gave up the search years ago. The children, yes. Always the children for Jacqueline. When they were younger, they ventured bravely across this expansive field to the windbreak where the black and white magpies built their sizeable bowl-shaped nests in the crooks of the poplar trees. The magpie nests, a messy mass of sticks and stones and leaves and twigs and thorny branches tangled up in the stripped-down arms of the winter trees. The nests large and dark and complicated. So ominous in the distance that Nate and Clare and Lesa imagined them dead bodies bundled in the trees—but, no, only the barbed mess of their chaotic quarters.

He glances once more at the kitchen window refracting the white field, the white sky, the white cloud ever-present in Lloyd's sleep-deprived mind, some distant past. The cloud surrounding his Sylvie, his Jacqueline—his unspeakable absence. His past versus Jacqueline's presence versus their future, a single cold blue imprint stamped on Lloyd's horizon. He wishes Jacqueline were at the window so he could see her. But she's not. Insular now, interior, as if when Sylvie left a part of Jacqueline went with her, not unlike the live wire pulsing at low frequency beneath Lloyd's pale skin—insular, unremitting, a constant reminder whether he likes it or not.

He turns out onto the secondary highway that takes him south.

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Lloyd cranes his stiff neck, twenty hours into his shift, can hardly stay awake at the wheel. Will have to stop along the way to find coffee and food for both himself and Jimmy. No cars in sight, nothing to see here but the frozen white prairies that span the distance to an equally pallid horizon. A bleak glacial landscape with the northern wind cleaving across it. Lloyd pulls the napkin from his shirt pocket and glances over it. Funny that Judge Wade chose Michener over Ponoka, which is the closer of the two government-run mental institutions. Perhaps Ponoka is not admitting at the moment. He hopes the handwritten napkin is good enough, weighty enough for the present until they can properly admit Jimmy Widman.

Lloyd checks his rear-view mirror: Jimmy cleaned up, stitched up, neatly jawed, is curled in the back seat of Pete's Camaro in a woman's powder blue ski suit. He looks as if he's ready to head out skiing as they drive south toward Red Deer, and farther on the Rockies in the distance that stretch down to the Montana border and beyond. The
beautiful fucking
Rockies, Lloyd recalls Lesa pointing out when she was only eight years of age as they drove to Montana one year. Lloyd smiles at the thought, takes a puff of his rank cigar. Without taking the dense smoke into his lungs, he exhales out the slightly rolled-down window.

“You with me, Jimmy?”

Jimmy spouts Moby-like, whimpers canine as he rolls on the back seat. His broken ribs bound tight by the doctor. Smells like dog shampoo, and something else too, Lloyd thinks. The heady scent of jasmine, perhaps? Lloyd inhales deeply, yes, Chanel No. 5. He's sure of it, the kind Jacqueline used to wear. Lloyd pictures Jacqueline: young, vital, essential, her coppery red hair piled on top of her head, her violet eyes glossy with promise. And him too, young, strong, thick black brush cut, the glimmer train of his potential in his dark flashing eyes like the polished metal buttons down the front of his red serge. Between the two of them their entire world a shimmer, a sparkle, a shine like it was only yesterday. The scent of Jacqueline present in his car, his nostrils, the warm memory of her close in his mind. He should be able to reach out and touch it, as concrete and tangible as he and Jacqueline once were, no longer seem to be.