The Opening Sky (38 page)

He goes into the bathroom and uses the toilet, glances while flushing at his turd, ancient and greenish in this blazing light, possibly mossy. He washes his hands and face, brushes his teeth. He’ll shower at work; he’s got clothes there. He makes coffee and flax toast and sits at the counter in the kitchen, eating his toast with honey. The air conditioner is already on, at seven-thirty in the morning. It’s
so
hot, says the city. And soon it will be fucking cold. Make yourselves comfortable, you suffer enough.

Peas lie near the gas jets on the range, perfect balls of pure black carbon. Sylvie refused dinner last night, and then she came down to the kitchen and made the dish known in this house is as Indian fried rice. Aiden and Liz sat on the deck the whole time, which required no small exercise of will on Aiden’s part, because his impulse is to never stop talking to her until he figures this out.

Kenora is a couple of hours east of the lake, just across the Ontario border. Aiden and Noah made the drive there to pick Sylvie up. On the way home she stayed awake. She said she’d been sleeping at the hospital while she waited for them, she would help Aiden watch for deer. She asked him if he knew who was looking after the baby, if he had seen her.

“So, honey, you stopped to bury a diaper?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

“I walked up the ridge. I just went for a minute. She was sound asleep. I was thinking about field school.”

“Could you see the lake?”

“I could see the lake once in a while, and at first I could see
the hydro line. But I think I must have followed them in the wrong direction.”

“I can see how you might get lost. But I don’t get how you ended up so far away.”

“Neither do I,” she said in a small voice.

“You remember somebody picking you up?”

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

“I guess I fainted.”

Noah had slept most of the way to Kenora, and from the stillness in the backseat, Aiden wondered if he had fallen asleep again. She’ll tell me when we’re alone, he said to himself. He was disappointed, because the three of them talking this through together felt like a good idea. He’d felt such a bond with Noah by the end of their long day of walking side by side through the bush. And they shared that moment of exhilaration and relief when the cruiser drove up to the search site, just when they were marshalling for supper, and the ponytailed cop announced that Sylvie had been located. By the time they had picked up the Jetta in Powerview, by the time he’d called Liz with the good news, Aiden was high as a kite. As he was buckling up for the drive to Kenora, he looked over at his passenger and it seemed that Noah was haloed, his even, tanned, unexceptional features edged with the late evening sunlight coming in through the dusty windshield. How moved he was that Noah wanted to come along, that he was giving himself to their confused family.
Son
, he wanted to call him, the way men do on
TV
.

He gets up and stands at the window, looking at an empty sky never until this year seen from this yard. A few weeks back, Liz hired a man with a grinder to chip the stumps of the elms. He charged them a fortune and drove away in a blue truck, leaving three massive golden pyramids behind. Somebody has to shovel
up that sawdust and haul it away. It’s too hot; it’s been too hot all week. Anyway, Aiden’s instincts are to sit still, keep everything the way it was, so that when the baby comes back and opens her wide, dark eyes in this property they call her home, there won’t be any continuity errors, nothing she can latch on to as proof that she was ever away.

When he got home from work last night, a police car was parked on the street in front of the house. Sylvie’d already given a statement, but an officer with a blond brush cut wanted to ask her a few questions. He was initially professional and neutral – Aiden noted his efforts to avoid terms such as
hitchhike
and
abandon
. But after they’d gone through the story of how she managed to get herself lost, he said (as if his was the first brain shrewd enough to have picked this up), “Here’s what I don’t quite get: You stumble out of the woods around noon the next day. You stand on a secondary road until a motorist stops. And you let this individual drive you south and east, out onto Highway 44,
away
from where you left your baby. You let him drive you as far as Kenora.”

“East? I didn’t know what direction it was. I was just glad somebody picked me up.”

“Did you tell him you’d left your baby alone in the car and had to get back?”

Always the pause. “I tried to tell him. He didn’t speak English.”

“What language did he speak?”

“I don’t know.”

“What might it have been? Take a guess.”

“Indonesian?”

“Can you describe this individual?”

“He was maybe forty.” Pause. “He was just ordinary looking.”

“He didn’t speak English, and yet he had a driver’s licence. Frankly, that’s another puzzle to me.”

“He was driving. That doesn’t mean he had a driver’s licence.” She had a canny look.

“You could be right about that. But he had a truck. A big – what was it? – black truck. He stopped and picked you up in a truck and he drove south on Highway 11, and then he turned east and went out on Highway 44. Did he harm you at all? Make, er, sexual advances?”

“No.
No
.”

“And you stayed with him all the way to Kenora.”

“I was waiting for a town. So I could get out and call someone. And then I might have fainted.”

“You might have fainted?”

“I had been walking and crying all night. I had nothing to eat. Anyway, what was the hurry?”

“What was the hurry?” The cop repeated this without inflection, but he darted his eyes to the side as if to say, Where is the jury when you need it?

Sylvie, forced to speak the unspeakable, was scarlet. “If my baby was still in the car, it was way too late to help her.”

Aiden bikes through the traffic-clotted streets to work, a middle-aged professional man on a hybrid bike. At the office he showers and changes. They’re doing a Schubert hour on Classic 107. Christine Tolefson comes in looking alert, a little life in her painted face. Then it’s Norman Orlikow, his hair combed as if he’s just stepped out of the
Mad Men
dressing room, wearing saddle oxfords and what Aiden would call a bowling shirt. Sylvie would know whether his look is retro or just weird.

Norman is back after a six-month hiatus. He approached Aiden at the coffee kiosk in the lobby of Aiden’s building a few days ago.

“I’d like to make an appointment, Doctor Phimister,” he said. “But these are my terms.” He actually had only one term: they don’t go back to “that stuff that happened.” Aiden understood that Norman didn’t want to pay for the broken window. His eyes were fluttering nervously and Aiden was struck by what a tiny seed willingness is. But it’s all you need, really – or all you are likely to get.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

“You know,” he says now, “seeing we’re making a new start here, I want to clarify a few things. First off, I’m not a doctor. You can call me Aiden. Second, we need to be clear about why you are here. This whole process is about you learning to see yourself. So you can change. Get over certain things, think about yourself differently. It’s not about enlisting me to confirm how cruel the world has been to you. You will be in therapy forever if you don’t grasp that.”

“Wouldn’t you like that? At a hundred bucks a shot?”

“No. I’m not using you for my own ends. That’s not what this is about.”

Norman seems to be taking this in, turning his lips thoughtfully inside out. It’s a fascinating display, like watching an octopus emerge from its den. Then, as an illustration of how sincere he is in his efforts to change, he launches into an account of the work picnic he just attended, at which he tried hard to come out of himself by signing up for volleyball, a sport he’d enjoyed in high school. But sadly, he was ostracized during the game. Volleys that should have been his were scooped and tipped towards other, more popular personnel.

Aiden keeps his eyes on Norman through this whole sad saga, but he can’t entirely control the voices in his head.
You keep up that crying, I’ll give you something to cry about
.

He runs at noon, runs in the punishing heat. Two guys are sitting outside the shack on the riverbank, drinking beer. Aiden feels
a lurch of longing as he peers through the trees. Could you subsist on cattails and catfish? Water – could you drink from the river? Not likely. The river is swollen, it’s menacing. You used to be able to trust it but you can’t anymore. It’s chewing at the banks, it’s full of phosphorus and spiteful alien species.

And the air is smoky. A hundred miles away, close to Minaki, close to Otter Lake, the forest is burning. Out of nowhere he thinks about his mother, the way she died. Did she see anything as obliteration flew towards her, as it brutally smashed through the windshield? Did she have a split-second of knowing? In a way he hopes she did. She always believed the world would end with a bang; it would have meant something to her to find out she was right.

Back in his office he jumps into cold water, a naked man soaping his balls in the heart of an office building. He pictures a woman in the next office, two feet away. Sitting at a computer entering numbers on a spreadsheet, eating machine-made sushi off a black foam tray. She lifts her head and says, “Is it raining?” The hot water hits and Aiden reaches in her direction, reaches for the shampoo.

Then he’s standing at his office window with damp hair, eating his sandwich – red pepper hummus and cucumber. The exercise endorphins have kicked in, his serotonergic system and his noradrenergic system briefly align. “An Indonesian-speaking individual?” he hears Liz say. He shrugs. Does it really matter at this point?

B
y midafternoon Liz is up on the stepladder, feeding Polyfilla into cracks on the western wall of the dining room. It’s thirty-four degrees but she’s full of jumpy energy, she’s got to do something. She stretches to reach above the window frame, scraping her trowel over a tiny crack like a bolt of forked lightning. Amazing how much shifting a hundred-year-old house will do.

Sylvie sits on the floor below her with a garbage bag, grooming Max. It’s strange and lovely to have her barefoot and cross-legged in the archway where she played all the time as a kid. She’s twenty now. They had a quiet birthday with an ice-cream log from
DQ
. She’s thinner than she was at this time last year; she’s lost her pregnancy weight and more, and her cheekbones add a new, serious character to her face. Her hair is caught up in an elastic and damp, wavy strands are plastered to the back of her neck in this heat.

For two weeks now the baby’s been in the foster home. Sylvie doesn’t talk about her. This morning they made a list of things she’s prepared to do, and she agreed to tackle one job a day, just to get moving. Plant the lupins Liz picked up at the greenhouse – there’s enough sun in the yard now for lupins. Organize their digital pictures into files. Go through her boxes of stuff from the dorm. “I miss Kajri,” she said when Liz mentioned the dorm.
Call Kajri
, Liz wanted to write on the list, but Sylvie wouldn’t let her.

Liz drags the stepladder to the north wall. This at least is a methodical job, a job you know will yield results: just let things dry and sand faithfully between coats. Against the chalky white of the filler, the old paint shows up dull and tired. It was some sort of ecru – although it would have had one of those designer names.
Operation Desert Storm
is the only phrase that comes to mind.

“My mother was so into pastels,” Liz says to Sylvie. “Remember? Her lavender room and her aqua room and her pink room? And every room had one wall papered with a floral print in the same colour. The feature wall, she called it. They bought that great big split-level just when Auntie Maureen and I were leaving home. It gave Mom something to do. She spent two years dithering over colours.”

You’re dithering over colours, Sylvie points out by her silence, and in silent rebuttal, Liz calls up a picture of her mom in her new home, setting a polished cherry-wood table with perfectly matched
and aligned china and silverware. Her mom at the kitchen sink, scrubbing at pots with a martyrish zeal while the rest of them sit at the table eating their dessert. Wearing a pastel polyester pant suit with a coordinating floral blouse – she looked like she’d been peeled off one of the walls of her own house. She was my age, Liz thinks with surprise. No. God. She was
younger
. There’s a mystery there – she catches a dizzying glimpse of it and wants to go closer, but an iron door clangs shut in her face. She puts a hand on the wall for balance, heedless of the fresh filler.

Just then Sylvie finds a tick on Max’s belly, latched on but not engorged. She pulls it off with a Kleenex and holds it up to show Liz.

“Oh, get that away from me!” Liz says. “You know, when I was young, finding a wood tick was a huge deal. We found maybe one a year. Now they’re all over the place. Bedbugs – it’s the same thing.”

Everything is changing, Sylvie seems to say by her silence.

Mom
, she says these days, and Liz says,
Yes, honey
. Like the other day, when they were out on the deck, and she said, “Mom? How many condoms in a package?”

“Usually twelve,” Liz said. “Why do you ask, honey?”

“There were only seven in Noah’s bathroom at the lake.”

“He likely gave some to a buddy,” Liz said. “Guys do that.” It was an opening, and a better mother would have run with it. But, god knows, they all need a little reassurance at the moment.

Sylvie has an appointment to see a psychiatrist next week. The police are waiting to see the report; they want to know whether she fits the profile for postpartum depression before they decide whether they will charge her. “I’ll tell them a story and they’ll make up their minds,” Sylvie said at the table last night. “Is Sylvie okay or is she sick? Is she good or is she evil? Can she be a mom or can’t she?”