The Matter of Sylvie (13 page)

He stubs his cigar out in the ashtray, remembers his children, small, hugging his neck tightly, Nate whispering goodbyes that tickled his ear and made him laugh. And from Sylvie even, the rare odd hug that stuck with him for months afterward. Lesa and Clare clinging to his navy pants with the familiar yellow RCMP stripe, unable to let him go. The entire lot of them: his world, his wife, his children, his life on a glorious half-shell, waving and blowing kisses on the front step of the row housing where they used to live, like he was leaving for good but simply for work. Over the years the long hours, the gradual drift: exhausted wives, preoccupied husbands, children in worlds of their own who barely noticed whether he was there or gone. It feels like forever ago, like someone else's dream entirely.

Lloyd shudders with the cold leaking in from the partially opened window. He rolls it up, glances into the back seat at Jimmy Widman, curled, sleeping again. His mashed face, his mouth agape, eye stitched and swollen, a nasty bruise forming beneath his jaw. He hopes to God Jimmy Widman's sleeping dreams are better than his waking ones.

Her black Spandex beneath her jeans, changed into tennis shoes and Moroccan sweater, Lesa's storm is half over. Her mind no longer addled from the partial joint, the early morning flight, too much coffee, not enough sleep, the impossibility of Mr. Green, her mother, the dead coyote. She finds herself in Red Deer, not entirely cognizant of having driven the long, lulling stretch from Carstairs on. She crawls along on Gaetz Avenue, the 10:30 AM traffic slowed by construction or perhaps an accident up ahead. So that when she should have turned right onto 32nd Avenue, she didn't. Instead she followed the slow-moving line of mostly pickup trucks through the centre of town, ending up on the bridge. She didn't remember a bridge or the river the last time they came to see Sylvie. Could be she missed her turn?

The traffic stopped, only one lane open, the other three closed for bridge construction. She realizes her error. She watches the Red Deer River below while she waits. The water fast, flowing, deep, brilliant blue despite the weak October light. Brings to mind something about rivers from a philosophy course she took at UBC. Everything flows, nothing stands still? Same river/different man? Too much water, not enough man? Never good at sayings or philosophy, Lesa studies the river, thinks instead of her father. Too much water under the bridge? No, it's not that either. Nor does she believe that where her father is concerned.

When she learned of her father's illness, shortly before she graduated from high school, then she spent his remaining years learning him. Who he was, why he was, where he'd come from, where he was going, where he ended up. Not a perfect human being by any standards. Certainly not the kind of husband she will choose, but surely, despite his dalliances, surely he must have loved Lesa's mother? Hard to believe, but why else would they stay together? On the outside their marriage as temporary as basted seams, but on the inside, who knows what private sutures stitched them one to the other? The children perhaps, Sylvie, shared grief ? Lesa can't surmise. All she knows is that as a father he couldn't have loved them all more.

She waits on the stalled bridge, wishes her father were still here, still the suspension between Lesa and her mother. When he died three years ago, their bridge collapsed entirely, leaving Lesa heartsick, rootless, and drifting from one boyfriend to the next in Vancouver, frantic in her loneliness, desperate to fill the recesses that even now feel bottomless. And on the prairies, her mother, alone, silently desperate—the two women remote, divided by the fucking Rockies, isolated in their grief over her father.

The line of traffic moves slowly over the bridge. Lesa glances to her right and spots the white facade of the Michener administration building on the hill this side of the river. Damn, she's missed her second chance to turn. Now she'll have to circle back around. The traffic slouches along. Eventually she clears the construction, loops back around, then waits once more in the lineup heading across the same bridge, different river to retrace her steps to Michener. She keeps her sight on the white facade lest she forget what she came for. Never forget, never forgotten. There it is, she thinks, everything and nothing.

Lesa watches the dark blue water rush below, longs for accelerated bridges, live fathers, mended mothers.

Jacqueline wanders down the hall to check on Sylvie once more before she lies down on the sofa. She will not sleep with her husband tonight. Perhaps never again. She hasn't made that decision yet. All she wants to do is get through to the morning and see how things look then. She peers into Sylvie's tiny, holding-cell-sparse room, illuminated by the yellow glow of her night light. Sylvie isn't in her bed. Her covers are pushed down to the bottom of her bed, nothing special about that as Sylvie often thrashes about while dead asleep. But where is Sylvie? Once she's down for the night, she's rarely wakes until 4:00 or 5:00 AM. Seldom does she wander from her room. She can't hide in the closet because Jacqueline keeps it locked so Sylvie doesn't take all her clothes out and then pile them on the floor and urinate on them like a coyote marking territory. No dresser to crouch behind due to Sylvie's penchant for climbing anything. Jacqueline was afraid that with Sylvie's remarkable strength, she might push the dresser across the room to the window. She had Lloyd move it out into the hallway. No, nothing in Sylvie's room but the single metal-framed bed that she hasn't managed to pull apart thus far—the bed, but no body.

Jacqueline feels the bile rise from her empty stomach. It didn't occur to her until now, until this exact moment.
What if ?
What if
the man came back? The scar on the man's right cheek, his hard eyes and inverted teeth flash across her mind as clear as the burst of sheet lightning that illuminates the room then. As clear as if
that man
is standing in some murky corner of Sylvie's room, or under the bed with Sylvie beside him, his large hand covering her crooked mouth. Or possibly the front door is wide open and they are already gone. Jacqueline flips the light on. Nothing. She runs down the hall to the living room, her head woozy from exhaustion, nausea, lack of food. She trips on their lime-green ottoman. She reaches out to catch herself on the hi-fi cabinet and accidentally turns it on as her body hits the floor. Ted Daffan and the Texans' scratchy 1944 hit. His dark, mournful voice, liquid in her ears as she lies on the damp carpet. He sings
Born to Lose
into the black of her living room.

Where does her husband find these outdated records? How many times has she lain in bed listening to her born-too-loose, intoxicated husband, crooning along to that song? Like an alcoholic's national anthem. Where her husband finds solace, she can't imagine. Jacqueline's throat tightens. Not until now has she allowed herself the thought or even the idea that anyone could be born into this life to lose. But fresh with fear roiling in the pit of her belly, stirring in her uterus, she thinks of Sylvie and considers otherwise. She sees tiny lights shimmer like fragmented stars before her eyes; her head light, dizzy. She might pass out. She's weary, so goddamn, born-to-lose weary. She could lie here in their identical row housing on their worn-out carpet amid the damp vomit and her children's Lego, with no one, not even her husband, to save her from the wreckage.

She hears Lesa yelp from her bedroom.

“It's all right, Lesa,” she croaks, “It's just the hi-fi.”

Lesa doesn't reply. She might be sleep talking.

Jacqueline regains her head, pulls her heavy body up slowly, turns off the Texans.

She listens in the silence for Sylvie's insistent chatter, but hears nothing. Then she sees the light from the kitchen. Hadn't she turned that off when she put Nate to bed?

Every hair on her body is raised. She hobbles across the room, avoiding the overturned footstool. When she reaches the light, the doorway, she listens again. Now she hears Sylvie's soft breathing like a sigh, her chatter more subdued than normal. She hesitates. What if Sylvie is not alone in the kitchen? Swiftness and surprise are the key, this she knows from her husband's work. It's the only chance she has. She breathes shallowly, readying herself to burst into the room like a lone-woman Emergency Response Team.

Sylvie spins past the doorway in the kitchen.

What is she doing?

Jacqueline peers sideways into the room. The deadbolt on the back door is secure, windows closed; no one is in the kitchen but Sylvie, twirling about like a ballerina in the yellow light with a butter knife and the jar of peanut butter that Lesa forgot to put back in their childproof cupboards. Jacqueline's relief is audible, but as swift as it comes, it dissolves. Like the relief she feels when her husband comes home after his shift. He's alive! she thinks each time, but then the moment is flattened by the smell of Crown Royal on his breath, the awful scent of another woman inexplicably on his body.

Sylvie is eating the peanut butter straight from the jar. Worse, peanut butter is everywhere: on the countertop, the table, smeared on the cupboards, across the black-and-white checkers of their linoleum, painted over the walls like Sylvie does with her feces in the bathroom if Jacqueline doesn't catch her in time. Jacqueline could kill Lesa for leaving the peanut butter out. That is, as soon as she gets Sylvie under control.

Sylvie doesn't stop when she sees her mother but continues to alternately lick the butter knife and then swirl the peanut butter on the countertop with her slender fingers. Her black hair is wild, askew in brown clumps. She has peanut butter on her hands, up her arms, down her legs, and if this weren't the camel's last straw or Jacqueline's also—if under different circumstances, a day other than today—Jacqueline might run and grab the Brownie and capture this snapshot of Sylvie for later, for laughter, for memory, for the posterity of her children, for her delinquent husband to see.

“Sylvie!” she yells before she remembers not to.

Sylvie's dark eyes go wide, feral. She drops the butter knife on the floor and bolts around her mother into the living room. Jacqueline knows that in a matter of seconds Sylvie will have covered the entire living room in peanut butter.

All Jacqueline feels is monster, intentional.

There is no point in chasing Sylvie. Futile. Sylvie is quick, agile, and can easily evade her. Instead Jacqueline goes down the hall to her bedroom, sits on the unmade bed, lights a Peter Jackson, inhales as severely as her lungs will allow. She can hear Sylvie moving about in the living room, no doubt rubbing the peanut butter from her hands onto the back of the chesterfield. With each cavernous intake of nicotine, she feels her fury subside. Instead the
dis
-ease takes over, reeling through her veins the strange deadening of morphine—the gentle narcotic slip of an undertow. This Wednesday has been building since seven this morning, Jacqueline thinks, since Sylvie was first born.

It's as if someone else is in charge now, someone she doesn't recognize. Someone whose children are all normal, manageable, reasonable, with a husband who comes home every night without the second-hand smell of liquor and secondary women on his body that she longs to cling to despite everything.

Her cigarette ash drops to the floor. She doesn't care. Light the house on fire and she wouldn't care either. She thinks about
that man
still out there lying in wait. If not for her Sylvie, then some other vulnerable child. She thinks about her husband, also out there, in the arms, the bed of some other woman. Another other. And despite the fetus and the fear living as one in her belly, she realizes that while she no longer
wants
her husband—whether by God, or by the sheer luminosity of their children, she
needs
him. The two are twisted up like electrical wires, complicated and live.

The shame that she cannot do without him is crushing, makes her want, no,
need
to get down on her knees in the dark and pray. She slips off the bed onto the floor. But to whom, whom can she pray? How do you pray to a God capable of such duplicity? How could anyone? She cannot do this alone. She needs someone to believe in, someone to blame. She doesn't drive, hasn't worked in eight years. What kind of job would she get anyway? A telephone operator on night shift like she did before she got married? How could she care for the children then? Besides that, where would she and the children live? Who would look after the new baby? She doesn't know. She's down to the burnt filter of her cigarette, down also to elemental despair, suddenly stripped down and terrified. She doesn't know anything anymore.

She stabs her cigarette out in the ashtray next to the bed. She listens in the black for Sylvie. She can't hear her. Sylvie must have exhausted herself, peanut butter being the sleep elixir. White light flashes across the bedroom window followed closely by the crack of thunder. Too close, she thinks. It reminds her that the outside world is hazardous, beyond her, beyond the primal fetus in her uterus. Certainly beyond Sylvie. Possibly beyond God?

She gets up, feels the metal burrs collect beneath her mother-skin: assemble, align, form barbed wire. Jacqueline knows what she needs to do.

North of Edmonton, Lloyd pulls into the Burger Baron, rolls down his window. The frigid air invades the warmth of Pete's Camaro, causing every hair on Lloyd's body to rise at once despite the bulk of his RCMP parka, the layers of clothing beneath, the beige shirt his wife presses for him each Sunday, the undershirts she bleaches. The unwelcome cold forms bumps along the surface of his skin.

“Can I help you?” says an impatient female voice through the metal speaker, which shakes Lloyd from his reverie, the inward cold.

Lloyd peruses the menu but can't make out the beef from the chicken from the fries from the onion rings due to the white frost assaulting the faded coloured images: the pictures like memory itself waning with age, light, time.