The Matter of Sylvie (6 page)

She passes the Second Cup without stopping, joins the early morning rush-hour traffic on John Laurie, meanders slowly east past Fourth, then Centre Street, where most of the cars drop off and head south to downtown while she continues on. She hasn't really thought about where she's going other than simply away.

She merges north on Deerfoot, pulls the white wig off, runs her fingernails lightly through her hair like her mother used to when she was a kid. She wishes she were a kid again. That brief period in time when no matter what, all is forgiven; everything slips away like silk to skin, smoke to air, a magician's
trick
performed by her mother. This last thought forming goose-bumps along the surface of Lesa's freckled skin beneath the black Spandex. She knows the
trick
of the dysfunctional family only too well in that it leaves you lacking, looking for something that doesn't exist. A kind of neatly packaged perfection she might find only in Samsonite luggage and smooth-handed strangers. She knows also the illusionary
trick
of memory: the curvature of her mother's long nails like the curve of mother earth itself running through her child hair. The jasmine scent of her mother's Chanel No. 5 mixed with the dark of her Peter Jacksons, the present chill in the October air.

Lesa lights a cigarette, feels the nicotine slip down her throat, fill her lungs, and then deeper she imagines, along the cylindrical walls of her veins where her blood also runs quick and deep and dark.

Jacqueline looks at the gold spiral clock on the living room wall. It's half past three. The dishes are done, laundry put away, pork chops are thawing on the Arborite countertop in the kitchen. Jacqueline managed to cajole Sylvie and Nate down into the cool basement to play Lego, or at least watch Sylvie play Lego. No one else is allowed to when Sylvie is present, only in Jacqueline's dreams does Sylvie share. Nate runs up and down the stairs retrieving his Hot Wheels cars two at a time from the living room, one in each of his chubby three-year-old hands. Lesa hasn't surfaced from her bedroom since the officer left. Jacqueline starts down the hall to check on her, but again, like in the kitchen, she feels an irrational rage that she knows she can't inflict on Lesa. She stands in the middle of the room, paralyzed. Should she call her husband again? What if he still can't be reached? Surely they are doing everything they can to contact him? She's not sure she can stand to hear that he's unavailable at the moment and would she care to leave a message? She puts her hands over her face, but then Nate thumps up the wood stairs again and stops, watching her. She wipes her face and reins herself in.

“Would you like some cheese slices and apple?” she asks.

Nate nods.

“Go back downstairs and I'll bring some.”

Nate disappears into the basement.

Jacqueline goes into the kitchen. She's got all the doors and windows locked. The house is stifling. She slides the kitchen window open slightly while she peels apples over the sink. Outside the sun is directly overhead, the height of the afternoon heat. The air is dense and muggy, like before a thunderstorm. She avoids looking into the alley; she can still see the station wagon idling in her mind's eye, Sylvie in the back seat waving merrily goodbye as the car disappears into the transparent waves of heat rising off the gravel. She looks instead to the sky in the west; sure enough, it's darkening, preparing for something. She recalls the huge red sun on the horizon this morning. Really, could it only have been this morning? The day feels like months. She remembers: Red sky at night, Sailor's delight, red sky in morning, early warning. Storm warning. Had she known, she would have locked herself and the children safely in the house for the day and made Play-Doh on the stovetop, or built Lego castles, or finger-painted, or drawn stick people in a row and cut them out and hung them like a regular family across the span of their living room wall.

The doorbell rings. Jacqueline slides the kitchen window shut and goes into the living room. She parts the drawn curtains and peers out. It's the officer from next door. He must have forgotten something, or perhaps he's got news to tell her. She opens the door and lets him in. He stands in the living room without saying anything.

“Is everything all right?” Jacqueline asks.

The officer avoids her eyes.

“Did you find him,
that man
?”

Oh, God, she sounds like Sylvie now.

“No,” the officer says.

“Is it my husband, is my husband all right?” Jacqueline asks, bewildered.

Why is he making her guess?

“Your husband is fine.” The officer reaches out and puts his hand lightly on her shoulder. She looks him in the eye. She knows they are trained to do this. Reach out and touch someone before delivering the bad news.

“No,” he says, sensing her body tense up. “It's not that.”

“Where is he?” Jacqueline asks. “Where is my husband? How do you know he's all right?”

The officer takes his hand off her shoulder and looks at her directly.

“He's indisposed,” he says. “I don't know where. I tried to find him. A few of the guys at the office thought they might know . . .”

He stops.

“He's MIA,” he says, no smirk, no pun.

Jacqueline regards the officer for a moment, notes the depth of his green eyes. She doesn't ask why or how, nor does her face crumble or her chin quiver. She knows. Her heart, her belly, her groin; in some distant past she's always known.
Dis
-loyal. But her
dis
-ease is strong, stronger than even this understanding, her salvation of sorts. Where it was sporadic before, now it reaches systematically inside and shuts her down like a light burning too long into the night, a slow gas leak from the kitchen stove. She reaches up impulsively and puts her arms around the officer's neck. His smell is alarmingly different than her husband's, not in a bad way, but different, earthy like dirt, so she is immediately aware of the consequences of her actions, but she's not thinking right now.

She needs to know she's present, accounted for, alive in the moment. It doesn't matter if the officer pulls her body against his, if she feels the round metal buttons of his uniform pressing into her unfettered breasts beneath her husband's sweatshirt, the thick leather of his gun holster straining in opposition to her left hip, his hands on her shoulders, her back, her thighs. None of that matters in this primal moment. She simply needs someone. Anyone. She feels his hands on her back, making small circles, gestures of comfort. She holds him taut, waiting for him to release her, but he doesn't. He lets her hold him in this way while she clings to him like a starfish to a stone. She inhales the summer damp of his skin beneath his uniform like the sea itself: close, humid, salty as she lightly kisses his neck, thankful for his civility. Then she releases him and he stands before her as though nothing had happened.

He's not so much older than her, she realizes as she surveys his unmoving, tanned face, but old enough to know what it's like to stand at the edge of a high bluff, your losses circling below you like alligators waiting for your downward plunge. The officer watches her carefully. She sees no lust, no carnal knowledge on his lined face, nothing but the shared loss in the shape of children, your own, other people's forgotten children, kittens, jobs, lives, spouses.

Jacqueline glances down the hallway and sees Lesa standing there.

“Lesa,” Jacqueline says, tilting her head, once, gratefully toward the officer as he makes his way to the front door, then leaves. The quiet click of Lesa's bedroom door as she shuts her mother out.
The metal burrs that form beneath the surface of Jacqueline's mother-skin.

Lloyd drives the kids out to the Métis Crossing to their aunt's house. The house is small, a
Please Take Your Shoes Off
sign scrawled on a piece of blue-lined paper at the back door. Lloyd bends down, baby in arms, struggles to unlace his brown Strathcona boots, sets them neatly on the hand-woven mat in the corner. A spattered black and orange cat that looks as if Jackson Pollock painted it sniffs the leathers of his boots, swarms Lloyd's legs.

The rest of the children have already removed their shoes, scattered through the house and disappeared. No doubt they've spent some time here. Lloyd stands in the middle of the living room holding the baby, surveys the aunt in the wheelchair, the immaculately groomed poodle in the woman's lap, a pink bow in the dog's caramel-floss hair. No furniture to speak of, save for the wheelchair, the single rocker, and a yellow marbled table in the kitchen with two chrome-legged chairs like Lloyd's mother had in the 1950s. Lloyd nods at the aunt: early fifties, he speculates. She doesn't seem surprised, smiles back at him toothless like the baby, the remedial smell of infirmity about her person.

“Mind if I look around?” Lloyd asks.

She gestures to make himself at home.

A couple mattresses tucked into the corners of a couple bedrooms in the back of the house. Downstairs the basement cement, bare wood framing. The kids piled together on some blankets watching cartoons on a small black and white television. Lloyd pauses, watches Dudley Do-right on the television struggle to untie his sweetheart from the railway tracks, a theme played out over and over again on
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
, in Lloyd's job, his life, present moment included, endless, he thinks. He winks at the kids, the oldest boy smiles.

Upstairs is the heavy, rich scent of game meat simmering on the stove. Lloyd peers into the pot, a large chunk of dark meat inside. The counter tops are clear, clean, immaculate, no alcohol insight.

“Husband?” asks Lloyd.

“Not today,” the aunt says, a slight smile on her lip.

Lloyd isn't sure how to take that. A pot of coffee on the counter that the aunt offers him, but he's had four too many already. He looks around the sparse room, the lone woman in the wheelchair, her poodle. Yes, he decides, he does need one more. The aunt points at a cupboard, Lloyd shifts the baby to his other arm, opens the cupboard, pulls out a mug.

“You?” he asks.

She nods. He pours two cups, stirs a spoon of sugar into hers, and sits with the baby at the kitchen table while he drinks his.

“You have children?” Lloyd asks.

She shakes her head, references the two kitchen chairs.

“Are these kids your sister's?” asks Lloyd.

“Yes,” she says, no opinion on her face.

“Can you manage the baby?” he asks, unwrapping his coat from around the sleeping child. He isn't as concerned about the other children. They seem used to managing. Yes, she can manage the baby; the older ones will help.

“Social Services will be coming,” says Lloyd.

The aunt nods, again no surprise, no opinion. Lloyd looks around. Outside the living room window slim poplars have been strung together in an open fort structure, the tan skin of a deer hanging amid the slow, curling smoke in the cold white air.

“Recent?” he asks.

“Last week,” she says. “Take some, it's in the freezer by the back door.”

Lloyd sifts around in his parka pockets for something to give her, jostling the baby as he does. The baby smiles in her sleep. All he comes up with are three cellophane-wrapped cigars from Neville's lounge last night, the slim kind, tipped in rum. He hands them to the aunt, along with the sleeping baby. The aunt smiles toothlessly, shamelessly, thanks Lloyd for his kindness, her nieces and nephews, the rum-tipped cigars.

At the door Lloyd pulls his boots on, laces them up while the aunt watches. When Lloyd turns to wave, she points at the large white freezer next to the door. He opens it, finds the freezer full of brown wrapped packages, pulls one out.

“Take more,” the aunt says. “The meat is rich, good. You have children?”

“Yes,” Lloyd says. “Three.”

He doesn't count Sylvie. She hasn't lived at home for more than a decade now. He can't remember if he ever counted her

“Tell your wife to soak it in sweet milk, less wild that way.” The aunt's lips curve.

Lloyd retrieves another small package from the freezer, nods at the aunt.

The aunt doesn't see him; her attention already turned to the sleeping baby.

Outside in his cruiser, Lloyd sits a moment in the quiet space, the still of the sparse land, the spare house. Nothing much to look at, he thinks, but more than meets his eye. This stripped-down world so different than his, the woman inside so far removed from the marginal few that wander in to spend their days staggering around town until Lloyd or one of his constables pick them up, drive them home or, like this morning, back to his detachment to spend the daylight hours in the drunk tank. But for the townspeople who see only those few gone adrift that wreak havoc on the rest of the barrel; they are erroneous ambassadors. He's guilty of adrift himself, of mistaken opinions. Not like the fifty-some-year-old, toothless woman in the wheelchair with a groomed poodle and a slumbering baby in her arms, a freezer full of deer, a basement full of children whom she will look after until her sister and brother-in-law return home, return to themselves. She's the fort holder, the one who strings it all together when things go sideways, askew. Lloyd knows the world needs more people like that, like the warm, steady core of his Jacqueline. He doesn't know why she stays with him, but he knows why he stays with her. He fishes his cigar butt out of the ashtray, relights it, puts the cruiser in gear, and drives off the reserve.

North now of the oil-affluent city readying itself for the Olympics only a few months away, the buzz of hurried construction, overhead cranes, closed-off roadways, the prairie city sprawls for miles in all directions in Lesa's rear-view mirror. Lesa amid the cars, the truckers, the farmer/ranchers barrelling down the black highway in their Chev/Dodge/GMC pick-up trucks and horse trailers. Lesa turns the radio on, scrolls through the stations till she finds, amazingly(!), Bauhaus. The black-clad, emaciated Peter Murphy singing “Bela Lugosi's Dead” and on the brown prairies no less. His deep, sonorous voice fills the airless void of her mother's Toyota Camry.