The Opening Sky (23 page)

A
nd he was right, Wolseley was in Sylvie’s bones. The contours of the riverbank at Omand’s Creek crept into every picture she drew. The old houses seemed right to her – This is what houses
are
– the garages that were once stables, the chalk-scrawled sidewalks dappled with sunlight, tiny footprints where a squirrel had scampered across wet concrete. The neighbourhood was a map of memories, smudged with the colours of all the things she’s felt. The Halloween she went out as Princess Furball and a guy in a Cyclops mask pelted towards her and wrenched the pillowcase of candy out of her hands – it’s still here on this street, her outrage. Here, in this back lane, the wonder of finding a huge dead pine sawyer beetle (the one she varnished and kept as a scarab in a little round tin). Here’s the house she loves best, where the guts of a grand piano lean against the veranda like a huge harp. Here’s the Dumpster where one Mother’s Day morning she ditched her white patent leather shoes with the bows on the toes so she wouldn’t be forced to wear them to Nana Glasgow’s. There’s the path to the river, where she would crouch in the undergrowth in her secret den, hidden so deep she could believe she was lost. Here’s where she saw a run-over squirrel writhing in the street and tried to catch it in a plastic bag to take to the vet. Here’s where she was riding her bike when the sun glittered on the leaves of a lilac hedge and she understood about her mother: She doesn’t like the kind of kid I am. Here’s the park where they all faked epileptic seizures, thrashing around in the weeds, and wouldn’t stop until they made Emily cry.

There’s the gargoyle crouching on the Callaghans’ veranda roof, a wicked face scaring wickedness away.

Thea lived three blocks away. All through grade six they put on plays on Saturday mornings, first in her basement and then in her yard. But by April, the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
remakes and
Dr. Who
had fallen away. They were going to Gordon Bell High School in the fall. Something old had run its course, something unimaginable beckoned. Sylvie was feeling it and all her friends were too.

From Easter on they did nothing but weddings, building an elaborate set with fairy lights and white sheets draped over lawn chairs, fighting fiercely all week to be the one who stood under the arch with a hand tucked into Nathan’s elbow. Sylvie loathed it. It embarrassed her – Jenn or Emily or Thea simpering as they strutted up the aisle, Celine Dion and the plastic flowers and the simulated kiss. Sylvie would only play the minister, who at least had lines that pleased her. The whole thing was childish – that’s what she let on, but really what she deplored was the cheap spleendour of the ceremony, stripped of the tests that should have come before: the noble prince riding his horse up a glass mountain, the princess hiding her true nature under mud and furs. Their glorious vindication, all wickedness revealed and punished. But how juvenile was that?

Then the summer came, and with relief she moved into another era, out at the old Fort. Even when she wasn’t at work she tried to be Rachel McKenzie, the factor’s daughter. She marvelled about riding in a car, for example, as if it were a crazy steam-punk invention. In bed at night, she read old books by candlelight. All of this drove her mother crazy, but her father thought it was very cool, and at first so did she. Then she outgrew her button boots and had to wear ballet slippers for the last month. She began to hate walking
through the gate of those stone walls, thinking of the Scottish traders who had huddled inside, while outside, on the riverbank, an aboriginal family lived in a beautiful tepee. That family was kept out of the Fort – proof of the fearful, racist attitudes she, as the daughter of the factor, was supposed to share. She was officially sick to death of embroidering, sick of Rachel McKenzie, who, pestered by tourists asking the same boring questions, had less personality as every day went by.

And then that was over too. Sylvie had only a week before she started high school, and she and her mother went on a holiday alone together.

The highway they took was straight and smooth, and the Earth, Sylvie noted, was totally flat: ahead on the horizon, you could see trucks and cars racing along its straight-line edge. Sun shone on the pavement but the sky to the south was dark – it was as if they were driving under a portobello mushroom.

Sylvie had her dad’s binoculars. He’d forgotten them the week before, when he hitched a ride up to the marina at Minaki, where he kept his canoe chained to a tree. The binoculars weren’t as easy to use as she’d expected. They made
everything
bigger, including the huge, empty sky. You could see a pair of Canada geese perfectly with your bare eyes, but they vanished when you looked through the binoculars. Then suddenly you’d find yourself right up beside one of them, so close you could imagine you heard the creak of its wings.

“Does your dad know you have those?” Liz asked. Sylvie glanced down at her mother’s platform sandal on the gas pedal, brown straw and wood. She herself was wearing the one new thing she had for high school: low-slung jeans with a beaded belt. There was to be a shopping trip, at the world’s largest mall. If the sort of clothes Sylvie
needed for her new life were to be found anywhere, apparently they would be found there, and her mother was the person to find them. Although maybe not. Her mother’s slim legs were tanned, not white like Sylvie’s, who had her dad’s fair skin, and his eyes and body type and hair. Liz’s hair was flame-coloured at the moment, and something snappish and hotter than usual radiated from her.

Sylvie lifted the binoculars back to her eyes. “He left them on the boot chest. He meant for me to bring them.”

“Yeah, right.” Liz was eating an apple. She finished it and opened her window, and the noise of the highway roared into the car.

Sylvie lowered the binoculars. “Hey!”

“It’s an apple core.”

“Mom! It will attract mice to the side of the road.”

“Mice.”

“And the mice will attract eagles. And the eagles will get hit by cars.”

Eagles. The minute they crossed the border, she began to look carefully for signs of American culture, which, on her father’s behalf, she intended to spend the weekend criticizing. Her father had been away most of the summer on his course, or else up at Grandpa’s cabin at Otter Lake, which was now theirs. Sylvie’s mother had spent the summer painting; she was totally redoing the house, as if hoping he wouldn’t recognize it when he came home. When they were together they either walked around in silence or they argued. They fought over money – all the money her dad had spent on the cottage – or mostly they fought because her dad refused to argue about money. They fought because he was dropping out of his Ph.D. program to start again, training for a job her mother said would always be marginal. Even when they were just exercising their wits in the normal way, there was a nasty edge to the way they spoke. For example:

As they drove, Sylvie expanded the lists in her Wonder Woman notebook. Of road kill. Of vanity plates. Of cool clothes she had seen people wearing. She maintained her lists and she worked on
colouring an intricate stained-glass window with felt pens. It was a beautiful maiden and a hunter in furs, very challenging, but (she thought, slitting her eyes to blur the colours) it was still colouring; against all her resolve, she had brought along childish occupations.

They passed two trucks of pigs on the way to market, their backs pressed against the bars – Sylvie could see their swinish skin. “They have numbers written right on them,” she said to her mother. “In blue ink. Don’t you think that’s insulting?”

“Mmm,” her mother said. Sylvie thought about the fur loft at the Fort, stacked with glossy pelts from plank floor to ceiling, the poignant stolen treasure of beautiful animals, and the horror she’d felt when she spied their dangling tails with
price tags
tied to them.

They passed an old-fashioned gas station with a yellow dog lying on its side on the gravel in front. Sylvie studied the dog, which was not leashed. “That dog is dying,” she said. “It must have been hit by a car.”

“Mm-hmm,” her mother said.

“Mom,” she said. “Do you think dogs go to heaven?”

“Mmm.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Think dogs go to heaven?”

“Heaven? What are you, Sylvie, six?”

Finally she said, “Why don’t you read to me.” Sylvie fished
Sabriel
out of the mess at her feet and opened it at the beginning. As she read, Liz cruised along with her head tipped against the headrest and a remote expression on her face. A few pages in, Sylvie started weaving some of her own lines into the novel, keeping her voice perfectly even (“especially those new products from Safeway, that you can buy with a coupon and serve to your guests after the theatre, as long as you remember to spray them with insect repellent and keep zombies
and vampires out of the fridge”). Liz’s listening expression did not change in the least, and Sylvie understood with a deep ache why her mom had asked her to read aloud. She put down the book. That got Liz’s attention. “Had enough?” she said. Sylvie didn’t answer.

They never actually drove into the storm they’d seen in the morning, but over and over, all day, the sky changed and the mood of the day changed with it. Sleep tugged at Sylvie, and when she opened her eyes again, the prairies and farmland were gone; they’d entered a forest. On either side stood massive trees of verdant green, with red and yellow patches hanging here and there in their upper branches. Not trees with needles, just great, spreading maples or oaks (what were they? she longed to know), each separate tree a towering goddess, and crammed so close together that they made a solid wall of green. She’d never seen such a forest, yet she knew exactly what it would be like to walk into it – the canopy shutting out the sky, the ferns and secretive toadstools in the darkness below, the scampering animals – and she pressed against the window in astonishment as they drove on.

THY PORTRAIT IN RENAISSANCE DRESS WHILE THOU DOST WAIT
. Sylvie dragged her mother over to the booth.
Whilst
, it should be, her mother pointed out.

The guy working the booth had tufted red hair and a crooked smile. He was trying to deal with a lot of customers at once, darting back and forth from one group to the next. “If you folks need any high-pressure sales tactics here, you just let me know,” he said as he went by.

“No, we don’t,” Sylvie said quickly to get him to stay. “We already want to do it.”

Liz opened her eyes wide with an annoyed and helpless look. The costumes were just fronts with Velcro fasteners at the back,
and you put them on over your clothes. Velvet and silk low-necked gowns for women, little-girl dresses. Sylvie found a boy’s
veston
and a chain-mail hood that she liked a lot, and the guy let her wear it.

Afterwards, her mother put the folder with the picture in her bag and they continued browsing along the circle of shops. Then they took a wrong turn and ended up where they had started. Liz spied a rough castle called Chateau Vino and said she was going to sit down and have a drink. She gave Sylvie ten dollars to spend, which, added to the money Sylvie already had, meant she was carrying a fortune.

It was better without her mother. There were moments when the dust stirred up by all the soft leather shoes hung in the sunbeams and you really thought you were in a Renaissance market. The costumes were wonderful. Little dogs were dressed like Elizabethan courtiers, with ruffs around their necks. At a snake display, huge cream-coloured pythons writhed around their owners’ necks and shoulders, and a contortionist made similar lithe and muscular movements on a stage. The rides were powered by strong men in pantaloons. Water had to be hauled in this world, like at the Fort, and wood had to be chopped, but it was a world full of magic. It was full of adults having fun. What kids there were tended to be fairies – more like
faeries
, which is the way she saw the word when they had garlands of fruit and flowers in their hair and wings made of overlaid transparent leaves.

A beautiful woman with a garlanded head approached two children. She was a faery herself and she couldn’t speak, but she beckoned the children away, dancing backwards through the crowd, and their parents followed, exchanging amused glances. Then Sylvie noticed a blindfolded man with hands and feet tied, lying on a cart, and a group of people jeering at him, spitting on him. She began to wish she’d come when she was small, instead of now, when she
was almost as tall as her mother. She was too old for the rides and the faeries; she was too young for the adult games.