The Opening Sky (26 page)

Bracing herself, she slides up her T-shirt and thrusts her left nipple at the baby’s mouth. The baby jerks her head as though Sylvie is tormenting her, but at the second try she grabs on, and Sylvie feels the shock that hits her every time, that her stretched and beat-up and sliced-open body should be used like this by another human being. Everybody takes it for granted. Her own body takes it for granted – her boobs, for example, which are big and hard as rocks. “She drinks it just like it’s the real thing,” she said to her dad at breakfast, and he looked startled and said, “Sylvie, honey, it is the real thing.” Apparently she’s no longer allowed to make jokes.

What freaks her out most is the baby’s eyes. Just now when the light came on, she didn’t as much as flinch. There’s never been any evidence that she can see – except, come to think of it, how scared she looked once when Sylvie bent over the bassinette. What Maggie said at the party explained that: the baby was mimicking Sylvie’s expression. Her eyes are half-open now, and Sylvie reaches over and turns off the lamp. In the dark the baby settles into her meal, sucking rhythmically, and an ache starts up in Sylvie’s abdomen, the way it always does when she nurses. Then she feels a light touch, as though a butterfly has landed on her. The baby has reached up and put a tiny hand on Sylvie’s breast, as if to comfort her. Warmth spreads through Sylvie’s body, and she bends her head, taking in the baby’s smell.

She’s just about to make the switch to her other breast when she hears footsteps on the stairs. The door opens all the way, letting in yellow light, and Liz is standing there in her blue silk robe. Sylvie clenches her toes in the sheepskin lining of her slippers.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Liz’s hand moves towards the light switch.

“Don’t!”

“Oh, okay.” Liz walks over to the bed and sits on the edge, where a few hours earlier Maggie sat talking in her soft voice. Her black shadow leans against the far wall.

“You don’t need to sit with me.”

“No, it’s all right. I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”

She’s brought the stale nasty smell of cigars into the room. Sylvie puts up her hand like an awning over the baby’s face, as though she can filter the air with her fingers.

“I’m sorry tonight was so tough,” Liz says. “We should never have had that many people over, or let them stay so long. I don’t know what we were thinking.” The blue robe she’s wearing is the one thing she owns that Sylvie has always secretly loved. In the dim light she can see the red flowers and vines twining over it. “It’s so great to have you home. You know, honey, being with you during the delivery was pretty much the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in my adult life. I want to thank you for inviting me to be there.”

“Yeah, well, people about to have their stomachs cut open will say anything.”

Liz ignores this. She reaches across from the bed and touches the baby’s foot, and then she presses damp fingers onto Sylvie’s hand. Her robe sags open, showing the shallow channel between her breasts. “I have loved these past few weeks, Sylvie. It’s been so special being able to give you support. And tonight I’m scared we’re going to lose that. I couldn’t get to sleep just now. I guess it was seeing Krzysztof come in that brought back that whole terrible trip to Minneapolis.”

Sylvie starts to rock herself in the chair (Fuck off, just fuck off, she breathes), but the smooth, sinuous rope of Liz’s voice keeps
on winding, tightening around her. “And so I just want to say I really hope we can put it all behind us. The trip, the whole thing. Because I can’t help but feel that it changed things for us. You know, you were only ten or eleven. You don’t know what happened, and you don’t have any idea what it—”

Her voice comes out as a roar. “I know exactly what happened! I know exactly what it meant! But you know what else? I don’t give a shit. It has nothing to do with me. So fuck off. Just fuck right off about it. Live your own sick life and leave me out of it.”

Liz bends forward on the bed and the black shadow bends over her. Fuck off and play by yourself, loser, the faun whispers in admiration.

Sylvie has stopped rocking. She
is
hollow, she doesn’t feel a thing. Just fingers of cold air on her ribs…
The baby
, she thinks with a shudder. It’s still there, a weight along her arm. It’s not moving, its lips are slack around Sylvie’s nipple. “Oh god!” she shrieks, jerking it up in horror. The baby’s head flops and she starts to cry, and then her mother’s bending over her, talking in a low voice, lifting the screaming baby out of her arms.

T
HE NEW MOM IS LEARNING TO DRIVE. HER PARENTS bombard her with arguments and she doesn’t have the energy to resist them. She walks into the licence bureau determined to blow the written test, but it’s ludicrously simple and she’s not smart enough to figure out how to get it wrong. So then she has her learner’s and she goes out practice driving with her dad while her mother minds the baby. “You’re a natural,” Aiden says as she zips down Osborne.

Women are in and out of the house all day – Wendy, Maggie, Genevieve, other women from
SERC
. They float in with arms full of useless consumer goods and croon over the baby and gush about her poop and the way she sleeps and nurses. And the new mom is doing just great too, after a few wobbles at the beginning. That’s what they all say, planting kisses on Sylvie’s cheek. She’s a plaything for Liz and her cronies (the old crones) and no one, not even her dad, gives a shit. No one gets what’s going on – that Sylvie’s been turned into the sort of person who drives a carbon-spewing car, for example – not one of them cares enough to intervene. No one gives a shit that she’s forced to live in the litter of Liz’s material excess, with piles
of wet wipes and used Kleenex around her; that she’s constantly subjected to hypocrisy and ignorant opinions and the smell of frying bacon; that she has, in other words, totally vanished, leaving in her place the sort of person she and her friends have always despised – a pathetic teenager with shit for brains who worries about her weight and shape and checks her phone every half-hour to see if her boyfriend has texted her. Who sits in the upstairs bathroom devouring her mother’s
Elle
. Who filches bacon in a paper towel, standing in the kitchen toilet to eat it. A loser who watches reality television hour after hour. That’s to barricade herself from Liz, who rarely goes to work, and whose phony caretaking zeal infiltrates every room of the house, forcing Sylvie to close her door and sprawl on her bed watching
What Not to Wear
reruns, mostly for the moment when the victim (usually overweight and always desperate to be special or even outrageous) is led to a mirror to see her new demure, kitten-heeled self and begins to cry with happiness and relief. Sylvie watches hungrily, turning a deaf ear to the baby’s fussing, trying to figure out: is anything left of who these women were?

It’s still cold but it’s already June. Her girlfriends, everyone but Kajri, come over to the house to visit. They crowd into the hall and hug Sylvie, and their hair gives off the childhood smell of spring from their bike ride over. They hand her a baby outfit they found at Value Village. They sit in the living room and steal curious looks at Sylvie, and they pass the baby around and swoon over her. “She’s awesome,” they say.

“Yeah,” Sylvie says.

“Look at her
eyelashes
,” they say.

“I know,” Sylvie says.

Somehow, visiting Sylvie gets them talking about
The Sims
. “I had three kids,” Thea says. “I gave them free will, because it makes the game more interesting, and they drove me crazy.”

“What do you mean, free will?” someone asks.

“They could take snacks from the fridge, that sort of thing, but they didn’t really look after themselves. If you didn’t take them to the bathroom, they peed on the floor.”

“I know, it was gross,” Jenn says. “I couldn’t deal with it. But I loved that game for all the stuff you could buy and the way you could fix up your house. Let’s face it, it was like playing Barbie and Ken. But without the sex, ha ha!”

“They could have sex. My couple had sex.” This is Ashley, lounging on the couch with her feet on the coffee table. She starts in on the story but Thea talks over her in her big voice.

“I got rid of my kids.”

“How? The game won’t let you do it.”

“There’s ways posted online. If you don’t clean their hamster cage, the hamster will get an infection and bite them and they’ll die.”

“Or you can put them in the swimming pool and take out the ladder,” Jenn says. “That’s what I did.”

“You
drowned
them?”

“Yup. One by one. They flailed around for a long time before their little arms finally sank under the water. It was kind of thrilling, in an evil way.”

And then embarrassment covers all their faces, it suddenly clicks with them how insensitive this is. So they jump into another round of elaborate compliments about the baby in the bassinette – Sylvie’s surprisingly real baby, who’s lying there dozing with her eyelids half closed and flickering.

It’s the week botany field school starts, the week Noah would have left for Malawi. But instead of flying off to Africa he’s living in a cabin an hour north, monitoring algae growth. He comes into the city on his days off and sits in the living room with Sylvie for an hour, holding the baby when she suggests it. He is a simulacrum
of his old self, too, wooden and quiet. Her mother is causing this, glancing through the archway at every opportunity to see how they’re getting along. Or the baby is, with her talent for transformation. When other people are around, she’s a white doll, perfect and serene, but the second she and Sylvie are alone, she morphs into a furious imp, squalling
waah waah waah waah
, her eyes fixed glassily on nothing.

Sylvie tries to tell Noah about it. “Well, she’s growing fast,” he says, “and you’re her food source.” It’s a fact that she’s hungry every hour of the night and day; she’s got the ravenous appetite of all invasive species. With her rough little tongue she’s worn the skin off Sylvie’s nipples, not that this deters her. Once Sylvie has a tiny white foot in her hand when the baby grabs onto her sore tit like a barracuda, and she digs her fingernails into the sole of it as a warning. Liz hears the ruckus and comes up the stairs. She takes the baby and Sylvie lies face down on the bed.

“It’s hard to settle an infant who is this worked up,” she says, walking back and forth, patting the baby’s back. “Noah needs to take his daughter on his days off. To give you some respite.”

“Is Noah going to breastfeed her?” Sylvie asks after a minute.

“Oh, it’s true,” Liz says with a sigh. “There’s always that.” The baby’s calmed down by then and she hands her back and waits until she starts to feed. Then she forces Sylvie to look at her. “My point is this: you have to work out a more formal agreement with Noah. If you don’t want me and Maggie interfering, you have to work it out yourselves. Or we will step in.”

She will die if she does not get away from this woman. She will die if she doesn’t find someone who sees what’s going on and cares. Noah won’t be on the boat until August; he’s at the research station, where he just has to take readings every six hours. She texts him:
CAN WE COME AND SEE YOU
? and he answers,
SATURDAY
?

She goes to find Liz. “Thea’s willing to drive me up on Saturday morning,” she says. “We’ll come back Monday.”

Liz looks at her suspiciously. “You plan to take the baby?”

Well,
duh!

Sylvie extends this phase of the operation until Friday, and then she goes sadly into the kitchen with the baby over her shoulder and announces that Thea was going to borrow her dad’s car for the weekend, but now she can’t. So can they take Liz’s?

Liz, intent on frying mushrooms, acts at first as though she didn’t hear. Then she dials down the gas, stooping to peer at the flame as though the knob won’t do its job without her supervision. Finally she turns to Sylvie. “You need to spend time together,” she says. “I know that.”

“So can we have the car?”

“We?”

“Thea and me. Thea will drive. She’s had her licence since she was sixteen. You’d only have to use the bus on Monday.”

“And Thea will stay for the whole weekend to help you out?”

“Yes.” Sylvie doesn’t react to this insult. She can see all the issues roiling around in Liz’s mind:
a safe crib for baby; contraception after baby is born; when wild animals attack
. “Mom,” she finally says, “I’m not asking you whether I can go. I’m an adult, I’m going. I’m just asking if we can take your car or if you prefer that I hitchhike with the baby.”

“Oh, Sylvie,” her mother says wearily. “Is this the way an adult talks?” She turns back to the mushrooms. “All right,” she says after a long minute.

When Thea appears at the door on Saturday morning, it’s obvious she hasn’t been to bed. Sylvie texted her,
BRING JAMMIES
, and she’s got her backpack with her.

Before either of them can speak, Liz pops up on the front walk. “You travel light,” she says.

“I don’t have a kid,” Thea says, instantly perky. “Not like some lucky people.”

Liz has been to the pharmacy; she’s dragging a humungous bale of disposable diapers.

Thea peers at the label. “Polypropylene, cellulose, and chemical gel,” she reads out in a bright and shiny voice.

Liz turns a shoulder to Thea. “Think about it, honey,” she says. “Are you going to schlep stinking cloth diapers back from Presley Point?”

“Actually,” Sylvie says, “I’m going to get a carrying board – what are they called? – a tikinagan. You fill them with sphagnum moss. It’s crunchy and dry. It absorbs pee.”

“Like kitty litter,” Thea says.

But nothing can deter Liz from dragging that bale of landfill out to the car. She’s already loaded the bassinette. Standing in the driveway after the baby is strapped into the car seat, she tries to get both Sylvie and Thea to lock eyes with her for a lecture about weekend traffic on the cottage highway. “Dear,” she says (or possibly
deer
) as she presses the car keys into Thea’s hand, “you really need to watch. Don’t be out around dusk. And text me when you get there.”