The Opening Sky (7 page)

“He was sired by a warthog,” Aiden said. “That’s what we figure.”

“What’s his name?”

“Max.”

All the while, Liz stood there clutching Maggie’s red coat. “Maggie’s partner is Krzysztof Nowak,” she explained when she managed to catch Aiden’s eye.

“Oh gosh,” Aiden said. “Well. I didn’t put that together at all.” Krzysztof Nowak. A minor national celebrity whose Prairie Gothic films Aiden is vaguely familiar with, though he registers the guy largely for the overweening display of consonants in his name.

“George Stonechild,” Maggie said, as though she were telling a long, sad story just by saying his name. “George is his dad, all right. George’s real name was always Oliphant. He dropped the Stonechild thing a long time ago. Anyway, Krzysztof is the one who more or less raised Noah. And he and I have a little girl, Natalie. She’s just turned six. So she’s a Calhoun-Nowak. We’ve got four different surnames in the house – it makes the letter carrier crazy.”

She offered Aiden a tender, regretful smile and poked the tips of her fingers into her hair, elevating the silver cloud a half-inch. This is all good, he thought. (One of us, he couldn’t help but think.) Although Liz and the woman were stiff as hell with each other. And when they stepped into the living room, he saw to his surprise that Noah and Sylvie were sitting on separate chairs, not holding hands on the love seat as you might have expected. Noah had the hood of his fleece up monkishly.

“Noah,” Maggie said softly, and he looked at her and slid it back. Then the doorbell rang again and Noah said, “That will be
my dad,” and Aiden saw Maggie’s equanimity slip. “He called me. He’s leaving for the States tomorrow, so I told him.”

“He’s got the right to know,” Sylvie added primly.

Aiden went back to the door. “Weren’t sure we could fit it in,” a tall man cried, springing into the hall with every assumption of intimacy. “Flying down to Texas first thing in the morning. George Oliphant.”

And this guy with his hand stuck out, greying hair hanging to his shoulders in some misguided homage to his youth, was also not entirely a stranger. Not that Aiden knew him by name, but it was a small city they lived in. Aiden would have seen him in lineups at the Folk Festival or buying bread at the Forks, could even vaguely picture him at younger stages. And here he stood in their own front hall, wiping his boots assiduously on the Afghan prayer rug, he and his tiny wife handing Aiden their jackets as he cried to the assembly at large, “Great to have a thaw this time of year.”

“Yeah, the polar bears are loving it!” Sylvie swivelled her chair impatiently.

“Leaving for Texas in the morning,” George repeated from the archway, rubbing his hands. “Going to stay through January. It’s always been a dream of mine to be part of the studio audience of
Austin City Limits
. It’s on my bucket list. Or what the hell is it they say now? You only live once.
YOLO
!” He was almost yodelling. “It’s on my
YOLO
list,
Austin City Limits
. Not as easy as it sounds – you can’t just go online and order tickets. Those Texas buggers want to keep the tourists out. They post the location a week before, and you got to know the city blind to find it. But I got a buddy in Austin. We’re going to get in – my buddy is confident.”

“They keep changing the concert venue?” Aiden asked stupidly.

“No, no, dude, the ticket wicket.”

George shook Liz’s hand and ogled Sylvie with avuncular appreciation. “Congratulations, kiddo! Noah is one lucky guy!” Then he turned to his son. “So, big guy! What’s all this?” and Noah got up with the courtesy Aiden had noticed when they met in the summer (though he kept his head down as if he was afraid a high-five might be coming his way) and offered his chair to his stepmother. Then he sat cross-legged at Sylvie’s feet and the dog wandered over and curled up beside him. George Oliphant arranged himself expansively in the leather armchair and turned his winsome face from one to the other with eagerness and satisfaction.

Turned his face a second time to Liz, who was just sitting down again. She looked away quickly. George Stonechild! With a wife like a miniature aged teenager, a wife named Patti, and his long, tapered braids gone, his dark hair shoulder-length now and showing some grey, but otherwise as good-looking and as absurd as ever. Her mind cast up a memory of carrying a sleeping Sylvie across a field, George Stonechild’s arm around her waist in ostentatious chivalry. But there was not a flicker of recognition in George’s eyes.

And Mary Magdalene Calhoun. Liz’s hands had been actually shaking when she took Noah’s mother’s coat. Maggie, Maggie Calhoun. She still has that gentle, precise way of speaking that asks you to drop what you’re doing, surrender to her tender gaze, and soak in every word. She’s still undeniably beautiful, though sporting a rough-woven anthropological ensemble that says everything about how stuck she is in the past. Resolutely, Liz drew courage from her own sleek outfit with its artful combination of neutrals, and from her lovely front hall with its one-of-a-kind prayer rug and the antique boot chest, from her knowledge that this house, which had been good when Mary Magdalene used to hold court from the Mission chair, was even better now, that it testified to Liz’s gradual transformation into a mature woman worthy of respect.

And sure enough, “What a great house” was the first thing Maggie said as she walked into the living room. Instantly Liz’s confidence sagged, because she remembered that after Mary Magdalene moved away from Wolseley, she lived in an absolutely unique property in Point Douglas – one of the original farmhouses, tucked into the middle of the city in a pod of green, at least 150 years old and with all the cachet of a funky, fabulous house in a marginal neighbourhood.

“You’re still in that amazing house in Point Douglas?”

“Did you visit me there?”

“No, but everybody in the city knows that house.”

“I guess they do. It’s true, it is kind of special. Well, we sold it. It was impossible to heat. We’re in River Heights now.”

And this young man was Sparky, a tall version of his younger self. He was five or six or seven when Mary Magdalene used to come to this house, a serious little boy, and Mary Magdalene was a single mom, moving on to the matriculation level of full-time motherhood: home schooling. Her boy was called Sparky because he had a fixation with electrical circuits. At his birthday party he was the happy recipient of a heap of extension cords in different colours and lengths and he worked intently all afternoon while the children played around him, arranging a circuit to some precise template in his mind. When he was done, Mary Magdalene supervised the insertion of a plug into a wall outlet. A lamp came on and they all clapped.

Would Liz have known him if he’d come to the house without his mother? Yes. He’s got the even-featured face he had as a kid, and the same dark, straight eyebrows, and that way of really listening, but from a distance. And there he sits, all six feet of him, with Sylvie in a half-lotus in the chair above him. Sylvie, who
never said a word
– that’s what truly knocks the breath out of Liz. Her wine’s
on the end table, she’s longing for it, but she doesn’t trust herself; she just sits with arms tightly crossed in her cashmere sweater, digging her fingers viciously into the slippery tenderloin of her forearm, pressing right down to the bone.

The Christmas tree lights twinkle on the windows and the fire crackles into perfection. The angel leans in to hear George Stonechild/Oliphant talk. No one has the will to wrest the meeting back from him.

“S
ure would love to jump in the car and drive down. That’s on my bucket list too. Anybody here ever do the Will Rogers Highway?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Sure you have – it’s the old Route 66. You pick it up at Chicago. You can stay in the room where Elvis used to crash on his way to Vegas. The Trade Winds Inn, Clinton, Oklahoma. They haven’t changed a thing. Still got the same toilet seat. Can you believe it? You can sit on the can where the King took his dump.”

“You’d never get that room, sweetie.”

“Aw, I’d talk them into it. They love Canadians down there.”

Shut up, shut up, Sylvie breathes. She untucks one leg, willing Noah to lean back against her.

“Course, peace-loving folks can’t actually drive into the southern U.S. these days.”

“What do you mean?”

“You got to cross states where carrying a gun is mandatory.”

“I don’t think that’s strictly true.”

“Oh, buddy, it’s true.” George casts Aiden a glance of pity for his naïveté. “And I’ve got no intention of packing heat.”

“George doesn’t have the greatest eye-hand coordination.” Patti’s eyes are gleaming as if there’s a story she’s dying to tell.

The colour in Sylvie’s face has gathered into a perfect crimson circle on each cheek and Noah is expressionlessly flexing his hands. Aiden gives up on any help from Liz. “You know,” he says, leaning forward, “maybe we should move on to the topic that’s brought us all together. Sylvie, Noah, this is a big thing you kids are facing and we’d like to sort out what we can do to give you some support.”

He gets to his feet and moves to lay another log on the fire. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” he says in his Monty Python voice as he passes Sylvie’s chair.

Oh, Dad, what would I do without you? she thinks. But it’s Noah’s face she’s yearning to see. Sparky, who last summer, when they were wading in the lake in the moonlight, fell recklessly backwards and pulled Sylvie onto him so they lay tangled up in the cold-warm water on a sandbar, one of his thighs angled across her stomach, and her joy oscillated out into the vast lake, and she said to herself, pressing her heels deeper in the dense sand and inventing a perfect word for it, This is
love
. She lays her hand on his shoulder and he hunches up his muscle. He’s trying to reassure her. Or maybe he’s going,
Don’t touch me!
Frightened, she pulls back her hand.

They ask all the things you’d expect them to ask. They are gentle and respectful and insistent. Or Maggie is – Maggie’s the one who does most of the talking. “Can I ask, Sylvie, when exactly you found out?” she begins.

She’s motionless now in the swivel chair. This baby has been bombarded with hormones every day, she wants to scream. Every day from the beginning. The way the mist thing in Safeway comes on and sprays the helpless vegetables. She’s started to imagine the baby’s dark eggplant shape, although really it’s only the size of a large pear. Liz could not resist showing her, that first night. About Liz’s contribution to this interrogation, her eagerness to talk about human error, Sylvie has nothing to say but “Typical.”