The Matter of Sylvie (2 page)

The countless lost futures, found fingers, wallets, limbs, stray shoes and families strewn across the highway. Blue babies in car seats, cribs, on doorsteps, the bitter backs of alleys, towns like his, reserves, cities—no one place or the other immune to the colour blue. And now the legal-age boy rootless and dead in the unforgiving North Saskatchewan River; the boy old enough to make decisions, young enough to know nothing of the Wonderful Wide World of Wickedness. He's seen that boy around town, he's sure of it, at the hockey rink, the drive-in: graduated from high school, shoulders squared up with the world, clean-faced, a bright, dazzling future. Surely the world his oyster, at his fingertips, innocent in his eighteen-year-old hands? Welcome to life and death, Lloyd thinks. He can chase the fairness all he wants, but he knows it'll never pan out.

Lloyd puffs on his cigar, gazes down the empty street. The north wind gusts, blows swirling snow, crystallized ice in the air, off the yellow street lights, the rooftops of Neville's hotel/café, the hardware store, Eve's Beauty Salon, down the dark soul-less sidewalks, the unpaved streets. Almost every lone moment he has, even now on this cold Wednesday morning, the dead and the living sit side by side like passengers in the back seat of his cruiser: Sylvie, like a live wire buried deep beneath the surface of his skin, the disquiet of an unfinished errand he can't bring himself to attend to. And all the others? Like blood that doesn't congeal.

Lloyd exhales the cigar smoke out the driver's window; the smoke hangs rigid, grey in the frigid white air. It's a disgrace, he thinks, a goddamned, cold-shouldered, undazzling disgrace, the imperfection of this world. He wipes his gloved hand across the dusty dashboard. When the sun comes up, he knows these night thoughts will dissipate. They always do, and in the few-lit hours of daylight, Lloyd will find reprieve in the salvo of a dark-lit lounge, strange women his elixir, his panacea, his magical cure.

He can already feel the perfect correction of Crown Royal in his mouth and the crimson lips of a blond stranger.

Lesa Burrows shifts her fire-retardant cape squarely across her shoulders and watches as the plane dips down through the early morning Wednesday sky, through clouds that float like giant, murky-edged ships painted by Salvador Dali. The plane descends in time to catch the enormous sun cresting on the eastern horizon. It's akin to descending into heaven, but of course that's the opposite direction. The sun throws luminescent red-pink-gold light down over the green-black patchwork of the surrounding prairie where her mother lives. God-light, Lesa thinks, like those calendars you buy at Christian bookstores that show God's translucent-truculent hand reaching down from Heaven proper, radiant fingers of bullying light bestowing the Earth with His greatness.

The thought makes Lesa want to light up a John Player Special and blow smoke rings out the window into the Dali clouds. She digs through her purse for her silver M.C. Escher case with the birds and fish morphing into one another, pulls out a John, and tucks the cigarette into the top of her Superwoman boots for later. Although the boots aren't really super or anything special for that matter, just a pair of old fake-leather boots Lesa found in the dumpster a few years back when she was still a student at Emily Carr. Every time she puts them on she feels like young Maggie Trudeau about to go off and play polo with the Rolling Stones. Mostly the pleather boots collect dust behind the metal-fenced storage cage two floors below the apartment where she and her boyfriend, a sculptor/instructor at Emily Carr, live in Vancouver's West End. When she gets back home, she'll return them to the dumpster for public consumption.

She glances sideways at the other passengers drowsy in their business suits and somewhat dishevelled shirts, ties lapped loosely around their necks, ready to be knotted into action for their business meetings in downtown Calgary. At the moment, her sculptor boyfriend has a twenty-foot-high exhibition of burnt toast on Granville Island. The thought makes her smile, and a good-looking man in a blue suit in the next aisle smiles back. She tucks the highly flammable white wig that clings to her too-thin face behind her ears and looks out the window, senses his lingering glance. She wipes her sweaty palms on her legs. It's almost Halloween, or at least it will be in a few days. This year she's dressed as Storm from the X-Men for her dead father, for her younger brother, Nate, whom she knows will retrieve her from the airport. Their mother doesn't drive. Lesa knows it's too early for costumes, but that's the point, isn't it?

This is Lesa's first time back for the memorial dinner her mother puts on every October 31 since her father died three years ago. Her father with a rare kind of cancer that devoured him slowly over the course of eleven years—from the inside out like a ripening pear, then overtly so, and no one noticed until the dark bruises appeared on his yellowing skin.

Last year for Halloween Lesa dressed up in her father's RCMP red serge that she inherited and went around handing out Saran-Wrapped Spam (she was amazed to find you could still buy Spam) and cheese and lettuce sandwiches with a cigarette and spare change taped on top to the street people in her neighbourhood: an act of benevolence on behalf of herself and, unofficially, the RCMP. Where Nate and her mother choose grief, Lesa chooses a celebration of sorts.

She lifts her head, glances sideways at the blue-suited man. He's older than her sculptor boyfriend but fit, conditioned like an ex-hockey player, she imagines, beneath his expensive suit. His face is even, slightly tan, a few wrinkles around the eyes, nothing to be concerned about, the beginnings of age carved into his cheeks that Lesa finds attractive, wishes she had them herself. His hair is blond-to-grey. Late forties, early fifties? But it's his hands that Lesa is mesmerized by, oddly young. The man looks up and winks at a small, dark-skinned child playing peek-a-boo over the seat in front of him. He glances over at Lesa, who can't stop staring at his hands, his smooth boy-hands. She smiles at him, goes back to reading the instructions on the vomit bag in the pocket in front of her.

Lesa watches out her window as the plane slides down to meet the rushing grey asphalt and, beyond that, the city where her mother lives.

“Welcome to Calgary,” the captain says in a voice that sounds like he just woke up.

“Currently, the temperature is minus eleven Celsius.”

The passengers with ties knot them into action, take leather briefcases down from the overhead bins, pull on woollen coats. The man in the blue suit remains seated, waits as the mother ahead of him pries her child off the back of the seat, gathers her purse, a diaper bag, struggles with the overhead bin.

“Let me help,” he says, standing to release the catch, then pulling down a pink and brown overnight case, which he offers to carry, but the woman protests in another language, Arabic perhaps. Then he withdraws his canvas duffle bag that looks like it could house skates and hockey gloves, pucks possibly. Lesa stands and smoothes her black rayon cape around her Spandex, then withdraws the cigarette from her super boots, wishes it were a joint instead, and waits to disembark. She hopes her Storm will be enough to get her through this Wednesday.

It's 10:00 AM. The children have already had their lunch—Spam and cheese and lettuce sandwiches—although Sylvie has barely touched her sandwich but drained four glasses of watered-down Hawaiian Punch instead. Lesa runs back every now and then to take a bite of her sandwich, a sip of punch, and then she's off. Jacqueline sees that Nate has discarded his lettuce into the clover patch beside the front step that she means to rescue. She peers down and sees the faint purple-blue hue of strangled violets vying for room and light among the spreading weed. Like a disease, Jacqueline thinks,
dis
-ease, the opposite of ease, which is how everything feels these days. Today in particular. Perhaps it's the pregnancy, though she breezed through her others—except for Sylvie, with whom she had morning sickness from the start of her pregnancy through to the emergency high-forceps delivery because the umbilical cord was wrapped several times around her tiny neck. Jacqueline should have known that something wasn't right.

She leans down and pulls some of the clover out from around the shrinking violets and thinks about getting down on her hands and knees, but the
dis
-ease inside her is pervasive, like morphine coursing leisurely through her veins until it takes over her body entirely. A pleasant enough feeling, but deep down, far beneath the surface, she senses the bottom. She knows she can't give in to the pull. She gets up and pours the remainder of her cold coffee onto the struggling violets. She glances down the street and counts one, two, three bobbing heads in the sunlight: Lesa, Sylvie, Nate. She goes inside the house to make more coffee.

She rose early this morning when she heard Sylvie stir in the room next to hers. The light outside, not yet dawn, was grey. She spread her hand across the double bed—Lloyd either gone earlier or not home from the night shift. She can hardly keep track anymore, the days and nights meld into a slow-motion blur. She tries her best to keep Sylvie occupied in the kitchen so she doesn't wake the other children. Lesa is a light sleeper and even the soft murmur of Sylvie's steady rambling is enough to rouse her.

Sylvie's dialogue is mostly directed at herself, the rare time at her mother or Lesa, when something, say, the striped orange kitten, Charles, that used to live next door and lurked beneath their front steps waiting to pounce on the children, appeared suddenly, playfully at Sylvie's bare, tanned feet. Sylvie yelped with surprise and delight. After Charles retreated and Sylvie could no longer find him, nor spot his glowing ochre eyes beneath the dark steps, she looked up, confused, puzzled. Unease seeping back onto Sylvie's fragile face, the familiar retreat beneath her dark eyes. But before that, the brief flicker of connection, the light on in Sylvie's eyes, that flickered also in Jacqueline's—with something other than the dull, protracted ache of an uncertain future.

That's all she wants—all any mother wants, Jacqueline thinks—is to keep her children close and warm and safe. And here was her Sylvie alight and excited, in the moment—why she couldn't stop talking and peeking beneath the steps, gesturing with both her hands that looked as if they'd been put the wrong side up on her slender wrists. But then days, weeks, seven months after Charles the kitten disappeared for good, for
real
this time and no one knew where, well, Sylvie still refers to it as if it happened that morning.

Jacqueline has dreams of Sylvie—articulate, lucid, standing easily at the top of the basement stairs, as if the fall that Sylvie took down the wood stairs to the concrete floor last autumn, which caused her to retreat even further from the glissant surface of her eyes, had never happened. Or else she dreams Sylvie's in the middle of the living room floor, the sunlight slants through their picture window onto the turquoise carpet, radiant off the crown of Sylvie's pitch-perfect black hair. Sylvie peacefully sharing her Lego, something she never does, with Lesa and even Nate, who knows better than to fight with Sylvie over anything; she's small but has the strength of ten bears. And no one is fighting in Jacqueline's dream as she lounges on their tattered red and black tartan chesterfield watching
The Guiding Light
on the television in its entirety. Her Dudley Do-Right in the kitchen preparing Swiss steak for tonight's dinner.

Then Sylvie gets up from the Lego and comes over to the chesterfield. She tells Jacqueline that yes, she is trapped inside her body like Jacqueline suspects, and yes, her circuits aren't right,
that
she knows.

“But deep down,” Sylvie says evenly, as if she's adult now. Sylvie puts her crooked face against her mother's freckled face so they see eye to eye like a Cyclops. “I'm here,” Sylvie says, lightly tracing the darkened circles beneath her mother's violet eyes with her child fingers. With Jacqueline's worst fear, her greatest joy confirmed, she looks into the bottomless pits of Sylvie's eyes. And here in her dream, always at the same point, is where Jacqueline opens her eyes to the black of her bedroom. She can't see a thing. Then Sylvie steps back from the waiting arms of her mother's dreams and returns to her private world.

Jacqueline pulls the sheet up, hugs her body until the shiver down her spine up her neck dissipates, then lies flat on her back, lets the tears run themselves dry before she gets up to check on Sylvie. The residue of dream like winter's breath lingers at the back of her mind, in the corners of her bedroom and Sylvie's, every room in the house, everything frosted over in white.

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Now in the kitchen at 10:30 AM she fills the Pyrex with water, scoops an indeterminate amount of coffee into the metal filter, and puts the glass lid on. She lights the flame on the gas stove and leans down to also light her cigarette. When she rises, she sees a gaggle of kids sprint past the back alley. She looks for Lesa, finds her among the pack, with Nate bringing up the rear and Sylvie running as fast as her legs can go alongside but not in the pack. The other children don't know what to make of her.

“Lesa,” Jacqueline yells through the screen window.

The pack stops.

“Mom?” Lesa says.

“You know you're not supposed to be in the back alley,” Jacqueline says.

“Ok, Mom.”

The pack takes off and rounds the corner to the front side of the street where the other mothers can see them. Jacqueline wanders back through the house. Toys are strewn across the carpet, the television is on, dancing bananas and apples—or tomatoes, she can't distinguish between them—polka across the dusty screen. If she could only get Sylvie to watch television, even for half an hour, she could rest. She's tired, although she suspects her weariness has nothing to do with the lack of sleep but with Sylvie, who can hardly sit long enough to eat, let alone stop and watch dancing fruit on the television. She looks at the broken wicker basket of laundry at her feet; at least the clothes are folded.