The Opening Sky (24 page)

Then she saw a faun wearing horns, a girl around her age with shoes made like hoofs, being held by the wrist by an adult as though she’d been captured and dragged into this babbling human market. The faun turned her face and met Sylvie’s eyes with an expression of wildness and bafflement. Not long after that, Sylvie spied a rack of small horns in a shop, and that’s what she spent a chunk of her money on. They were made of clay, glazed greyish white, and they looked exactly like animal horns. Their elastic was hidden by your hair.

When Sylvie got back to Chateau Vino, her mother was sitting on a stool and a minstrel was singing to her –
Catherine, would you do it again, fall in love with an awkward man?
– looking deep into her eyes, and she had a strange, inward expression. Sylvie waited until he’d gone and then she leaned against Liz’s shoulder and knee, doing the little girl thing in spite of herself.

“Great horns.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you tired of it yet?”

“Nope.”

“Well, maybe another hour, eh? And then we’re going to go see a friend of mine.”

Sylvie stood up. “What friend?”

Her mother said something she didn’t catch.

“What friend?” Sylvie asked again.

“I said, someone I know through Esme Gwynn. A filmmaker, a really interesting person. Might as well visit while we’re so close.”

Sylvie wandered back into the market. She saw a shop full of snow domes of fairies. The faery queen she’d seen enticing children into the market was standing flat-footed by the cash register.
“Twenty-nine ninety-five,” she was saying to a pissed-off-looking father. “Or I can give you two for fifty dollars. Just ’cause those girls are so adorable. What do you say?”

Sylvie stood at the fence of the play area and looked into the weary eye of the elephant. She drifted through the food kiosks where adults were drinking tankards of ale and chomping on smoked turkey drumsticks.
Legges
. She thought of her father, alone in a silent landscape of rocks and spruce. He was so far away it might be morning where he was; she could see him standing on the step of the cottage with a mug of coffee in his hand. She went back into the market and bought a net bag of chocolate gold sovereigns. Then she bought a pewter pendant, a bat with folded wings, hanging from a twig.

She still had fourteen dollars but she couldn’t be bothered to spend it. Finally she wandered back to Chateau Vino and agreed to leave. Liz asked a guy in an information booth where the exit was. “You got any money left?” the guy at the booth said humorously. “Because I’m afraid I can’t let you out until you’ve spent it all.”

Liz called her friend from the vast parking lot to get directions. She put on a lively expression as if she thought this friend could actually see her. Leaning against the car, peeling the gold foil from one of her chocolate sovereigns, Sylvie watched women wearing hoop skirts and velvet bustles climb into their
SUVS
. She placed the chocolate coin on her tongue, and as it lost its shape, she saw her mother’s face go from excited to tense. A picture rose in her mind of the three of them – Liz, Aiden, and her – sitting in the living room. The blinds closed, the
TV
turned off. She’s crying and her parents lean forward, each of them taking one of her hands. It’s not you, it’s us, they explain.

Then Liz snapped her phone shut and said they’d go back to the motel for the night and visit her friend the next day. She
scrawled directions on the festival program and dropped it into the pocket of the door.

“You know, I wasn’t thinking straight,” she said as she started the car. “There’s no point shopping in the U.S. on Sunday. All the best stores are closed.”

Sylvie lifted her bat pendant and pressed it to her chin, daring her mother to dig deeper.

And she did. “Americans go to church,” she said. “They still do the Lord’s Day thing.”

They followed a narrow road to the highway. The sky was clear and the sun was low. Black dogs of shadow bounded along the gravel shoulder, racing neck-and-neck with each vehicle. Sylvie turned the binoculars on one but she couldn’t catch it. She was wearing her horns, but she was leaving the festival the same girl who walked in.

S
PRING’S ARRIVED. THE SNOW’S VANISHED FROM the lawn, leaving behind a ghostly mould like a collapsed parachute. Buds swell on the ornamental plums and raindrops meander down the windowpanes. From the speakers in the Glasgow-Phimister living room, Joni is singing about the crocuses she’ll bring to school tomorrow. And on the coffee table, in a nest of eyelet cotton and white wicker, spring’s crowning specimen lies. Aiden can hardly look at her petal face for the clamour that starts up in him.

Krzysztof Nowak’s mother has been driven over for a formal viewing. No baby-kissing for her – she takes one skeptical look and hobbles straight to a chair. Noah touches a hand to Sylvie’s shoulder and walks towards the fireplace, studying the baby from a distance. But Natalie, his half-sister, runs across the carpet and leans over the bassinette, putting her face right next to the baby’s.

“She smiled!” she cries.

“It’s your smile she can’t resist,” Maggie says. “From the minute babies are born, they mirror our expressions.”

Sylvie’s in the Mission chair with an afghan over her lap. She’s a
mermaid washed up onshore, the flotsam and jetsam of the occasion all around her: a wooden rattle painted pink and cream, a mobile with seven belugas lying jumbled as though caught in a net. Three sleepers, four dresses with matching panties, three squeeze toys. Natalie shyly brings over her gift. A board book,
Goodnight Moon
. Thank you.

Rain thrums against the window and the room goes dim. Can Maggie pick up the baby? Yeah. And can Natalie hold her? Uh-huh. Natalie sits very still, her little arms full to capacity and her feet sticking straight out in fuchsia tights. Her face is like Noah’s when they put a pale yellow gown on him at the hospital and he sat in an armchair and held the baby. Grave. Inquiring. Unscathed.

The irises Maggie brought have found their way into a vase – Chilean irises, lifting their sharp purple beaks into the northern air. The
baba
sits with both hands on the head of her cane. She’s dressed as if she just got off a steamship from Gdansk. A doorbell rings on the sound track in Sylvie’s brain, but someone else hears and answers it. More flowers – pink roses and baby’s breath – from Auntie Maureen in Toronto. It rings again and Wendy from next door dashes in with an octopus she made for the baby out of purple yarn. She dangles her hand into the bassinette and the baby clasps one finger. The adults smile at each other across the kilim rug. It’s a reflex, they say, all babies do it.

Then George Oliphant is in the archway. “Congratulations, little mama.” A new George, with short hair and a soul patch and glasses with big black frames. Patti in a yellow slicker. With great ceremony they present a silver baby cup. “We would’ve had it engraved,” Patti says, “but we didn’t know her name.”

“That’s all right,” Sylvie says. “Nobody does.” She pushes at the pile of gifts to make room, and
Goodnight Moon
falls. She starts to bend for it, but black threads of pain pull at her stomach. She sits back.

“So where did this little critter come from?” George asks.

“We don’t know,” Aiden says. “We childproofed the house but she got in anyway.”

It’s real Champagne for once. He’s twisting the muzzle off the first bottle, the flutes are at the ready on a tray, and George Oliphant is up like a shot, snatching the bottle from Aiden, heading for the kitchen. Then he’s back in the archway with a butcher knife in hand, he’s sabre-slashing the glass neck, and Champagne bursts from the glass throat and splashes wildly over the flutes. They dodge flying glass, they cheer, and George decapitates the second bottle. They lift their flutes to the baby, awake and remote, still half in another world.

Aiden cranks up the music. He’s got a mix on: this is Shivaree’s big hit,
Goodnight Moon
. Some of them know it and they start to laugh. Aiden turns to the little girl on the couch and puts out a hand. “I believe this is your song, Auntie Natalie,” he says. She jumps up to dance and he looks over her head at Sylvie and winks.

Liz and Wendy took belly-dancing classes together long ago, and they raise their arms and undulate. George and Patti start to move with the stoned look of old hippies, and Max scrambles to his feet and barks. Sylvie angles her legs out of the way (
Your stitches are tearing, Sylvie
). Sparky’s up – his mother’s dragged him up – and Sylvie feels wonder at the sight of him in his clean jeans and worn plaid shirt, still encased in his old life. He looks her way with eyes
that beg for rescue, and the sexy voice from
Kill Bill
drips down the windows (
What will I do, I’m just a little baby
), and in the bassinette on the coffee table their own baby lies, her profile perfect and white and her fists waving. Behind her floats the face of the granny, scowling. She’s daring Sylvie to pick up the baby. Sylvie stares back. She’s beyond me, she says with her eyes. Look at her, she’s far beyond my feeble love. Then the doorbell in Sylvie’s head rings again, and she hoists herself out of the chair and goes out to the hall.

A man is standing on the veranda, a bulky man with dark greying hair and a shadowed face. Sylvie opens the door. “Krzysztof,” he says, in careless impersonation of a total stranger. “Sylvie?” he pretends to guess. He tosses his wet jacket on the banister and runs a hand through his hair. Maggie’s in the archway and he drops a kiss on her lips, then steps into the living room, where Liz is at the bassinette fussing with the blue and red quilt. She darts a glance in his direction and then she straightens up and works her way through the crowd to be introduced, a half-smile on her face and Sylvie’s sleeping baby as tender camouflage on her shoulder, and all the quiet treachery of the day finds its focus at last.